Streaming: Tubi continues to grow
Perhaps this is a good sign for ad-supported video streaming services
Tubi, Fox’s free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) service, revealed that it had achieved 64 million monthly active subscribers, up from 51 million in May 2022 and 25 million when Fox bought the property in 2020.
The company recorded a 44% increase in overall watching time year over year, with over 5 billion hours streamed in 2022.
Hoping to accelerate that growth even further, Tubi just signed a contract with Warner Bros. Discovery, adding over 2,000 hours of WB-branded content to its over 50,000 titles and 200 live TV channels.
Fox anticipates that ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) growth would be 9% in 2023 and 24% between 2022 and 2026, while subscription SVOD growth will be “pretty stable.” According to Fox’s annual report, “The Stream: 2023 Actionable Insights for Brands,” over one-third of U.S. viewers would stream AVOD by 2024, owing to the escalating costs of SVOD providers.
This is quite interesting in the sense that the absence of advertisements in streaming content has historically been considered as a key product differentiator. Nowadays, consumers do not seem to mind them after all.
This story was first published on The PhilaVerse (my Substack newsletter).
