TBI Tech & Analysis: How Tubi’s rapid growth stacks up in the US AVOD market

The Nevers (Source: HBO)

Omdia’s Sarah Henschel delves into the latest viewership figures for Fox-owned AVOD Tubi and what it means for its market position.

In Fox’s annual fourth-quarter reporting, the company announced that total viewing time on The Nevers and Doomsday Brothers service Tubi grew 59% year over year to over 8.5 billion streaming hours in 2023. December alone set a new monthly viewing record of 855 million total viewing hours.

Tubi, which is a free ad-supported streaming service in the US, also reported 78 million monthly active uses as of year-end 2023. When Disney acquired Fox in 2019, the studio business came under Disney’s umbrella while Fox’s regional sports networks and live linear business (including the fledgling Tubi business) spun off into its own company.

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Impact assessment and outlook

According to Omdia’s research, Tubi is the sixth most used streaming platform in the US on a monthly basis. YouTube remains the number one most used service.

Consumers are continuing to stack subscription services; however, paid services within the self-bundle are stagnant to declining while free services are seeing more growth. Price increases and cost of living pressures continue to push consumers to opt for free sources of content over more paid content.

Amazon’s Freevee and the Roku Channel have led the free AVOD market in terms of ad revenue over the past couple of years. Tubi’s growth in popularity and viewing time will continue to convert consumer time into revenue. However, despite being a top-viewed service, Fox still has work to do to monetize consumers at the rate of Freevee and Roku.

Amazon and Roku also have the advantage of platforms with high engagement across multiple ecosystems while Tubi and Pluto TV operate more at the service level versus platform ownership level of the market.

The excerpt above is from the ‘TV & Video Industry Developments Impact Brief – March 2024’, written by Omdia’s Sarah Henschel, principal analyst for Media & Entertainment. Omdia, like TBI, is part of Informa Tech. To read this brief in full, click here (subscription required).