International soccer fans will have a new way to catch up on World Cup action when teams take to the pitch in Qatar later this year. Fox Sports will broadcast all 64 games of the tournament live on Fox and FS1, but cord-cutters will also be able to watch every single match on-demand via Tubi.
Viewers will be able to find every World Cup game on the Fox-owned free, ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) service as soon as they end according to Tubi’s founder and CEO Farhad Massoudi:
Through synergy with FOX Sports, EVERY @FIFAWorldCup match will be available on-demand for free right after the final whistle on Tubi in the U.S. A huge win for soccer fans – and a huge win for our advertising partners.
— farhadm (@farhadm) May 16, 2022
The World Cup will be played in Qatar from Nov. 21 through Dec. 18., during that time of year, viewers in the Eastern time zone of the United States will be eight hours behind Qatar, meaning that games that kick off at noon local time will happen at 4 a.m. in New York and 1 a.m. in Los Angeles. With Tubi providing games on demand, fans can now watch matches on their own schedule without having to wake up in the middle of the night to cheer on their team.
This setup will also bring more value to Fox’s investment in World Cup’s broadcasting rights having paid $425 million to be able to air the 2018 and 2022 tournaments.
Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch has been clear that despite the company’s success with sports on broadcast and cable, it did not plan to bring live sports to its free streaming service. However, last year, Tubi did expand its VOD sports offerings to include 10 channels of nearly 700 hours of professional and college sports action found across Fox’s stable of channels.
Earlier this month, Tubi reported that the platform hosted 51 million active users during the first quarter of the year. The service also announced that its viewers had set a new record of 3.6 billion hours viewed on the platform in 2021, a 40% year-over-year increase in total viewing time; making World Cup games available for on-demand viewing very well could help Tubi hit another record in 2022.
Tubi
Tubi is a free video streaming service that includes on-demand access to 200,000+ movies and TV episodes - more than any other streaming service. Its ad breaks are shorter and less frequent than most free services. Fox executives have called their service “TV on steroids.”