During their keynote address at MIPCOM in France, Tubi, the free ad-supported streaming service, shared that viewers watched 132 million hours in September, up 40% from the 94 million hours streamed in May. In an effort to keep growing — the company is taking on two new ambitious areas of expansion — with kids and international streamers.
Tubi Kids to Launch Next Week
Starting on October 21st, on Roku devices to start, the company will launch Tubi Kids with a library of 1,200 titles of age-appropriate content in a special section in the Tubi app. With the over 5,000 hours of content — kids will have access to hit movies like How to Train Your Dragon and series like Sonic the Hedgehog, Strawberry Shortcake, Paddington Bear, and The Wiggles. Tubi Kids will roll out to other devices like Apple TV and Fire TV in the near future.
Tubi to Launch in UK in Early 2020
In late August, Tubi expanded internationally for the first time with a launch in Australia. Now the company plans to launch in the UK in early 2020, with additional territories to follow.
“We’re ramping up our international expansion with the UK launch being the first of several forthcoming territories and look forward to announcing them soon,” said Farhad Massoudi, CEO of Tubi. “The launch of Tubi Kids reinforces our dedication to offer an age-appropriate viewing environment – super-serving kids and families with a robust amount of content.”
In May, Tubi announced that it surpassed 20 million monthly active users. With their growth over the past year, the company claims that they have become the largest free movie and television service.
Tubi isn’t the only free ad-supported streaming service looking International for growth. Pluto TV, which was acquired by Viacom in January for $340 million, is already available internationally in UK, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but the company has major international expansion plans. The service, which has 18 million monthly actives, debuted Pluto TV Latino in July, featuring 11 linear Spanish and Portuguese-language channels for U.S. customer — and expects to expand to Latin America in 2020.
Another, Xumo, which has 5.5 million monthly actives, is planning to bring their service to Europe later this year. In the U.S., Tubi has seen more and more competition enter the market — including Amazon’s IMDb TV, Roku’s The Roku Channel, and Sinclair’s STIRR. But, by expanding their reach to both kids and abroad — the company hopes they can take advantage of a bigger base of streamers.