What’s my favorite feature about the free streamer Tubi?
What’s my favorite feature about the free streamer Tubi?
Let’s just say that creating an account with Tubi is worth the two minutes it’ll take you.
If you truly do get what you pay for, I suppose it would be fair to assume that you don’t get a ton of great features with a free streaming service like Tubi. In some ways, the axiom is borne out; after all, Tubi doesn’t have live sports and streams exclusively with ads, which are pretty standard trade-offs for a completely free service.
Tubi does offer you the freedom not to make an account if you want to just jump in and watch, but you have the ability to if you want to. I did, and it completely changed the way I experience Tubi; read more about why the control granted to viewers when creating a free Tubi account is my favorite feature of the service.
The most important thing to point out about creating an account with Tubi is that it never asks you for any payment information of any kind. The only effort you have to put into a Tubi account is waiting for a verification email to make sure you’re a real person, which takes only takes two or three minutes total.
Once you’ve got a profile, Tubi will remember your viewing history if you watch while signed in. Your history will compile across any device you watch Tubi on, so shows you watch on your connected TV device will appear on your laptop and phone as well. You can also remove shows and movies from Continue Watching on Tubi as well, and bookmark titles to add to your My List section on the service.
Adding a Continue Watching row when you create a Tubi account may not seem like that big of a deal at first, but for me, this feature essentially unlocked the ability to watch TV shows on Tubi. Before I created an account, I basically exclusively used the service for watching movies, since whenever I watched a TV episode on it, I would have to remember which episode I streamed so I could come back to the same place the next time.
The number of other settings you gain control of with a Tubi account is pretty impressive. You can set parental controls and create a password so that kids can’t access adult content on the service, and even sign up for a weekly newsletter to keep track of all the best new titles coming to the streamer and the latest news.
You can also add titles to My List to come back to them later, and adjust the background and font of your subtitles. Altogether, it’s a level of control that some paid streaming services don’t offer you with your account, and it’s a much rarer level of customization among free streamers in my experience. It makes me much more likely to use Tubi than other free streamers that don’t offer me as much ability to customize settings.
Tubi is still a free, ad-supported service, and you should approach it with those expectations when you go to watch. But you should also take the time to sign up for a free Tubi account when you start using the streamer more regularly; the level of personalized service you’ll feel when you do is totally worth the small amount of effort it takes.
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.”