Tubi had the fastest Super Bowl streaming experience
Tubi had the fastest Super Bowl streaming experience
Live TV streaming services like Fubo and YouTube TV were much further behind the live broadcast than Tubi, data shows.
Do Netflix executives need to call over to Fox and ask for some advice on live streaming technology? Perhaps, as Fox’s streaming service Tubi seemed to handle Sunday night’s Super Bowl LIX broadcast without much difficulty, despite millions of fans tuning in to watch the Big Game on a streamer that is not known for broadcasting such massive live events. New data from Phenix shows that Tubi outperformed paid streaming services like Fubo and Hulu + Live TV in a very important metric: latency, or the delay between when something happens and when fans see it on their screen.
Key Details:
- Tubi had the lowest latency of any streaming service carrying the Super Bowl.
- Fubo was the worst offender, followed by YouTube TV and Sling TV.
- In 2024, live TV streamers were all beaten out by Paramount+.
The numbers from Phenix show that the live stream of Super Bowl LIX on Tubi was an average of 26 seconds behind the action on the field. That’s still a little longer than ideal for viewers who are scrolling social media on their phones during the game, but it’s better than every live TV streaming service measured by Phenix.
DIRECTV STREAM, Fubo, Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV, and YouTube TV were all at least a minute behind the live action. Fubo had the worst latency time at 78 seconds on average, followed by Sling TV, DIRECTV STREAM, and YouTube TV. The NFL+ app was 51 seconds behind the live broadcast.
Click graphs to enlarge.
When measuring the range of lag times for these streamers, Tubi once again came out on top. Some Tubi viewers were as little as 15 seconds behind the live broadcast, and others were nearly a minute behind. However, no other streaming service managed to cut the delay to fewer than 45 seconds, and some Fubo customers were as much as two full minutes behind.
The data from Phenix shows that live TV streamers haven’t closed the latency gap. Some streamers improved from last year's numbers, but not by much. Fubo shaved around eight seconds of lag time off its Super Bowl stream in 2025, while YouTube TV, on the other hand, saw its latency increase over 2024, jumping by around 12 seconds.
Interestingly, in 2024, CBS’s on-demand streaming partner for the Big Game also outperformed every live TV streaming service in terms of latency. Paramount+ was an average of 42 seconds behind the live action last year, better than every live TV service just as Tubi was this year. Perhaps fewer viewers tried to watch the game on on-demand services than live TV streamers, giving their tech stacks more bandwidth to deliver the stream quickly. But whatever the cause, Tubi and Paramount+ have demonstrated that the best bet to streaming the game as quickly as possible might be via an on-demand platform. With NBC broadcasting the game in 2026, all eyes will be on Peacock to see if it can continue the trend.
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.”