LAS VEGAS\u2014Now that the Tubi streaming movie and television service is \u201cacross everywhere,\u201d it\u2019s hoping that subscription fatigue helps it continue to be an advertising-supported complement to Netflix in the face of mounting streaming competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore us there was YouTube and Netflix and that was it,\u201d says Chief Revenue Officer Mark Rotblat. \u201cWe are across all the major platforms, eighteen of them, mostly on televisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those platforms include Roku, Amazon Fire, Samsung and Sony smart TV\u2019s, along with gaming consoles, mobile devices and Android TV. In November of 2018, Tubi expanded<\/a> its footprint by adding 20 million homes in the Comcast Xfinity X1 footprint.<\/p>\n A free app for a service that doesn\u2019t 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<\/a>. \u201cReally, whichever model works best for the buyer. What they love is that it\u2019s only movies and TV shows.\u201d<\/p>\n Since there\u2019s no digital short-form content among the more than 9,000 movie and TV titles available on Tubi, \u201cIt 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\u2019s the cord cutters and cord nevers that are spending more and more time in OTT,\u201d says Rotblat.<\/p>\n Asked about the growing number of direct-to-consumer video services slated for launch by major media companies, Rotblat says, \u201cYou\u2019ll see in all these announcements are subscription services. Whether it\u2019s skinny bundles or otherwise, there\u2019s competition for that type of content. But we\u2019re really feeling that there\u2019s going to be some subscription fatigue.\u201d<\/p>\n He describes Tubi viewers as \u201cmedia enthusiasts who typically have one or two subscriptions \u201cand they kind of bounce around. They might have Showtime for a month, Hulu for a month for this show. But we\u2019re kind of the consistent that they know they can go and find just a massive library and it\u2019s free. They\u2019re willing to have ads if it\u2019s a light ad load that\u2019s unobtrusive.\u201d<\/p>\n Tubi\u2019s ad load around four to six minutes an hour, about a third of what\u2019s on linear TV, according to Rotblat. Ad inventory is mainly 15- and 30-second ads managed through the company\u2019s own ad server, \u201cand we have on average three to five ads per pod every fifteen minutes or so.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n