LAS VEGAS—Now that the Tubi streaming movie and television service is “across everywhere,” it’s hoping that subscription fatigue helps it continue to be an advertising-supported complement to Netflix in the face of mounting streaming competition.
“Before us there was YouTube and Netflix and that was it,” says Chief Revenue Officer Mark Rotblat. “We are across all the major platforms, eighteen of them, mostly on televisions.”
Those platforms include Roku, Amazon Fire, Samsung and Sony smart TV’s, along with gaming consoles, mobile devices and Android TV. In November of 2018, Tubi expanded its footprint by adding 20 million homes in the Comcast Xfinity X1 footprint.
A free app for a service that doesn’t require subscriptions, Tubi sells adds through both programmatic partner channels and direct to agencies and marketers, Rotblat explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “Really, whichever model works best for the buyer. What they love is that it’s only movies and TV shows.”
Since there’s no digital short-form content among the more than 9,000 movie and TV titles available on Tubi, “It really looks like what they buy in television and it solves the problem of linear ratings in decline, making it harder for them to reach their target audience through linear. It’s the cord cutters and cord nevers that are spending more and more time in OTT,” says Rotblat.
Asked about the growing number of direct-to-consumer video services slated for launch by major media companies, Rotblat says, “You’ll see in all these announcements are subscription services. Whether it’s skinny bundles or otherwise, there’s competition for that type of content. But we’re really feeling that there’s going to be some subscription fatigue.”
He describes Tubi viewers as “media enthusiasts who typically have one or two subscriptions “and they kind of bounce around. They might have Showtime for a month, Hulu for a month for this show. But we’re kind of the consistent that they know they can go and find just a massive library and it’s free. They’re willing to have ads if it’s a light ad load that’s unobtrusive.”
Tubi’s ad load around four to six minutes an hour, about a third of what’s on linear TV, according to Rotblat. Ad inventory is mainly 15- and 30-second ads managed through the company’s own ad server, “and we have on average three to five ads per pod every fifteen minutes or so.”
Tubi is similar to Pluto TV, which was recently acquired by Viacom for $340 million. Pluto TV is expected to complement Viacom’s cable distribution, as USA TODAY reports.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
