Tubi Is Not the Next Netflix. It’s Something Better

[Karlston]

The ad-supported service is home to the biggest content library of any streamer. So why is Tubi still considered a social punching bag?

 

Here’s a fun tidbit to toss out at your next dinner party: Tubi is home to the biggest content library of all the streamers. That’s right, the one-time underdog of streaming now claims it has more content than Netflix.

 

Tubi has over 275,000 titles from every era and genre of film and television. At least, that's what the company says; it’s nearly impossible to verify given the library’s size. Offerings span cult classics (Cooley High), ’90s heist movies (The Thomas Crown Affair), and everything in between—anime, Westerns, French New Wave, reality TV, popcorn horror. You name it and Tubi (most likely) has it. Yes, even Leprechaun 4: Lost In Space.

 

There’s a decent chance you’ve heard some of this before. Tubi’s free, ad-supported streaming service is having a moment. In the last 12 months it has simulcast the Super Bowl, along with Fox Sports, its corporate partner, and inked deals with the WWE—to air Evolve, a new weekly show of next-gen wrestlers trying to break out of the developmental league—and The Black List, to help overlooked creators churn out scripts. Tubi is also more popular than it’s ever been in markets like Mexico, where it is the exclusive provider of the Concacaf Champions Cup.

 

But despite its deep Rolodex of content and dedicated viewership—97 million monthly active users and counting—the platform continues to face poor public perception.

 

There are a seemingly infinite number of things to watch on Tubi—and a lot of it, by prestige streaming standards, would earn a failing grade. Tubi’s zero-restrictions approach to licensing has turned the streamer into “a bit of a social punching bag,” says Nicole Parlapiano, the platform’s chief marketing officer.

 

 

 

Tubi has been called everything from the “Criterion Collection but for really bad movies” to a platform for “D-tier straight-to-DVD shit movies.” It has stagy revenge thrillers like Bottle Girls Gone Bad and an undercooked remake of the 1976 horror flick I Spit on Your Grave. “Tubi got some of the most toxic low-budget movies I’ve ever seen,” @slscolours posted on X recently. “U can literally be [an] actor on there with no experience.” (Many barbs directed at the company, it’s worth noting, seem to be shared with love.)

 

But there is a reason—and a pretty radical one—why many “low-budget” movies are featured on the streamer. “We’re not here to tell you what is good, what is Emmy Award–winning,” Parlapiano says. “Listen, we have independent films that have really bad stunts. They’re campy. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We don’t have that veneer, and we never want to have it.”

 

 

The streaming wars were about more than dominance. Maybe more than anything, the battle over the future of TV was about who represented its most idyllic version. Where other streamers are often concerned with appealing to the widest audience possible or reflecting its tastes back to members through the originals it acquires, Tubi decided that was not the route it wanted to take.

 

“That was a game that everyone was playing,” Parlapiano says, “and it was a race to the bottom to catch Netflix.”

 

Tubi was founded in 2014 by Farhad Massoudi, an engineer with a degree from UC Berkeley, as an ad-tech platform for studios to be able to monetize their content. The goal, at least the way Massoudi first envisioned it, was to build backend infrastructure for studios to have their own streaming partner.

 

But Massoudi realized that scaling that version of his business, then named AdRise, would be too difficult. So he pivoted to an aggregated white label product via licensing deals. At the time, Netflix was coasting on the success of House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, breakout originals that set a new benchmark for streamers. Massoudi felt licensing could be Tubi’s bread and butter. He wanted it to be the company’s first real pure play as a streaming service in the market, with a specific focus on lower-cost content to keep profits healthy. And for eight years, that was the model.

 

By the end of 2022, as the era of Peak TV came and went, Massoudi was plagued by questions of expansion. What did Tubi stand for? Where could it carve out a unique path forward to compete in a crowded ecosystem that now included both major players—Apple TV+, Amazon, Hulu—and dozens of niche streamers like Shudder and Zeus. The streaming wars would soon be over; how would Tubi position itself in the era ahead?

 

Similar to YouTube, Tubi adopted a creator-friendly model. From a content producer standpoint, it was “very accommodating,” says J. Christopher Hamilton, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University who previously worked as entertainment executive at Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery. It was Black viewers, Hamilton says, who introduced Tubi to a wider viewership during its rebrand. “That’s largely why Tubi has been able to amass a degree of momentum compared to some of its competitors.”

 

As the company attempted to reset, it realized it could take advantage of the watercooler moments that were happening online. In 2023, several grainy, poorly-shot films found passionate audiences on TikTok and X. The films—with mocking titles like Amityville in the Hood and Cocaine Cougar—went viral across social media thanks to a cohort of creatives, many of whom were from the Detroit area. All of the projects were self-funded. “Tubi isn’t just a streaming service for fans to enjoy,” journalist Phil Lewis wrote of the trend, “it has become an outlet for independent Black filmmakers to showcase their art.”

 

And just like that, all eyes were on Tubi.

 

Fox had a similar rise to prominence in the 1990s in terms of its programming. “When Fox launched it started out distributing Black-targeted content that was steeped in the community,” Hamilton adds. Tubi was acquired by Fox in 2020 for $440 million, and by June of 2023, Massoudi had exited the company. “A lot of the success of the network happened on the heels of Black programming and Black audiences. Once they were at a certain level of success, they pivoted to more well-heeled demographics, which was white men. The playbook is very similar now.”

 

Today, Tubi has something that streamers often forsake in the name of big-budget prestige programming: total saturation. For better or worse, it’s got presence.

 

One major goal for Tubi this year, Parlapiano says, is to bring in more partners that help the streamer maintain its diverse catalog. The approach is pretty straightforward. “We focus on specific fandoms and genres,” Parlapiano says. “We don’t prioritize our own content over what people want to see. You like whatever you like, and it doesn't matter if we like it. We are not telling you what to watch. This idea that everyone should have FOMO around what to watch or where to watch it is exhausting. Monoculture is dead.”

 

It’s a gamble, but one she believes will pay off handsomely. “We do want to be a place where all sorts of creatives from different backgrounds can platform their stories and you don't need billions of dollars to do so.” To bring content to the platform, Tubi works with studios and independent distributors in addition to creating their own original content. The deals are structured as a multi-year licensing agreement or revenue share. As Palarpiano sees it, that makes Tubi the “most accessible player in Hollywood, both from a viewer standpoint and from who we work with.”

 

That doesn’t exactly help Tubi’s image problem, but it does give it an advantage over streamers with more credibility. “They’re Kmart. They have some of everything,” Hamilton says. “But what will keep them well situated in the space is that there is zero barrier for entry. There is no requirement to sign up for anything. It’s like television from back in the day. You turn it on and you watch. In terms of a business model, that makes them incredibly competitive.”

 

Is the goal to eventually dethrone Netflix? I ask Parlapiano.

 

It’s about respect, she says. “We’re not looking to dethrone anyone. We want to be considered within the same competitive set and be taken seriously. There is a stigma around free streaming apps that I think is quite unfair—that we are not as good.” But that’s changing. At its peak, 15.5 million viewers were watching the Super Bowl on Tubi. “I think that stigma is fucking gone now.”

 

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