Tubi TV was launched about a year ago and I guess I noticed the title but this is the first time I looked at it. There's a lot of movies and a few TV shows. Mostly unknowns, but a few big ones like Top Gun and Total Recall.
Here's the blurb from gigaom last year.
Watch out, Crackle, there’s a new kid in town: Sony’s ad-supported streaming service got some competition this week from Tubi TV, a new streaming app from the San Francisco-based connected TV startup adRise. Tubi TV is already available on Amazon’s new Fire TV, and plans to launch on Roku and Xbox 360 in the coming days.
Tubi TV’s ambitious goal is to become the
largest library of free movies and TV shows, adRise founder and CEO
Farhad Massoudi said during an interview earlier this week. At launch,
Tubi TV will have more than 3,000 titles licensed from partners like the
U.K.’s iTV, Endemol, Hasbro and Cinedigm. In the next six months, the
company plans to grow Tubi’s catalog to 20,000 titles.
Netflix subscribers will recognize some of
the titles, while others haven’t been available on other streaming
services yet. adRise Head of Bizdev Thomas Ahn Hicks told me that Tubi
isn’t in the business of licensing exclusive content, but that the
company’s existing relationships with content providers — adRise has
been building connected TV apps for Starz, Hasbro and others — has
helped to get access to a wide library of content.
So why would a studio or
production company that has its own apps also want to distribute its
content through Tubi TV’s app? Massoudi said that the connected TV space
is increasingly getting crowded, with hundreds of apps competing for a
viewer’s attention. Bundling all the free and ad-supported content in
one app, while also promoting the content of each studio, could help to
solve that issue, he argued, adding that Tubi wanted to become the
“first stop after Netflix.”
Hicks agreed, and said that Tubi could be
another option for users who already have Netflix. “This is really a
complement to what’s out there,” in regard to existing subscription
offerings, he said.
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How do they make money? Well, I guess from the ads. But now watching classic Who's Line Is It Anyway? It cut away to a bunch of ill-timed commercials. So maybe watchers will get so annoyed they'll pay .99 to watch commercial-free. Or so annoyed that they'll stop watching Tubi TV.
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