Tubi Reaches 1.3 Billion Hours of Total Viewing Time, Spurred by On-Demand Viewing
FOX held its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, and the news keeps getting better for its ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) service Tubi. The company reported that Tubi had reached 1.3 billion hours of total viewing time during the last quarter, up 53%.
FOX did not disclose an updated active user count following the first quarter of its 2023 fiscal year, but the streamer had 51 million active users at the end of the previous quarter.
Despite growing its collection of free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels to over 200, FOX co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch said that the streamer’s growth as actually spurred on more by on-demand viewing.
“Those fast channels are doing very well but are growing rapidly, but are overall a smaller percentage of their TVT (total viewing time),” Murdoch said. “You couple that with the largest library available in the United States with 48,000 titles, which, by the way, is five times the Netflix library, the cross-platform opportunities that we are executing on across sports and news and entertainment, it really sort of provides a tremendous platform that’s absolutely taking off.”
The numbers are good news for Tubi. Last quarter, it still lagged behind the free TV streaming service Roku, which had 61.3 million users; Roku will announce its Q3 numbers later this week. Tubi was also behind Paramount’s free TV service Pluto, which reported nearly 70 million active users in Q2. However, now 2.5 years since FOX took over the streamer, it is beginning to see the benefits of being part of the larger corporate structure.
Tubi has had a busy year expanding its content to try to lure in more viewers. Tubi now offers more than 200 channels, with the recent addition of local news stations operated by Scripps, as well as entertainment channels from Lionsgate, Cinedigm, and more.
The streamer has also been adding top-quality movies. It recently announced a deal with Lionsgate that will bring over 200 films to the platform. The partnership will include 30 new feature films that will live exclusively on Tubi, including “Shattered,” starring John Malkovich, Frank Grillo, Cameron Monaghan, and Lily Krug; “Pursuit,” starring John Cusack and Emile Hirsch; and “Wolf Hound,” starring Trevor Donavan and James Maslow.
Tubi also announced its expansion into additional Latin American countries in August. The platform was rolled out in Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Panama this summer, after first coming to Mexico in 2020. Tubi has seen its total viewing time in Mexico increase by 60% year-over-year and its total viewers grow by 40% since 2021.
That viewing time is likely to increase even further globally in November and December when the 2022 FIFA World Cup begins. Tubi will offer a hub that will feature full-length, on-demand replays of every World Cup match almost immediately after they finish airing on FOX’s linear channels. The FIFA World Cup Channel will also offer content from past World Cups, including historic matches from men’s and women’s tournaments, featurettes on former championship teams and the stars that powered them, and much more.
AVOD and FAST services are continuing to make big gains on subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platforms. If they continue to have success at the level that Tubi is seeing, it’s likely that even more services will attempt to hop on this very FAST bullet train.
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.”