Tubi plans to double its originals release to roughly 80 projects in the upcoming year while still prioritizing library acquisitions as its main focus. The service currently offers around 41,000 library titles, a substantial increase on the 25,000 or so on offer at its acquisition. Nallen said that while the service will continue to commission original content, library acquisitions will be the “lion’s share of Tubi’s programming going into the future.” “We put 40 new originals on Tubi in the last year – we’ll probably double that number next year, but I think this balance between heavy, heavy concentration on deep library and a few originals is how you’ll see the programming of Tubi for the future. Not [only] for the near future but the distant future," Fox Corp COO John Nallen said.
According to numbers released by Fox last month, Tubi clocked up 3.6 billion hours of streaming in 2021, up 40% from the prior year. Nallen also outlined some of the advantages of the AVoD business model, which has gathered significant momentum over the past two years, with the exec noting that 95% of the 41,000 titles available on Tubi are offered under a revenue-share model. Only 5% of the content is licensed. The platform does not plan to introduce a tiered structure at this time. “The ability to access it on a free basis is the secret sauce of Tubi, so we don’t have any expectation of tiering it or adding a subscription product,” he said.
Speaking at the 30th Annual Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference yesterday, Fox Corp COO John Nallen highlighted the importance of the streamer to Fox as a “core business” since its $440m acquisition in 2020. According to Nallen, the Tubi library had grown by 60% in the past two years, with acquisitions from companies including Disney, MGM, Lionsgate, Sony, and Paramount.“We’re buying a deep library product, we’re not buying their first-run product, which is going to places like Hulu or their own D2C products," he said.
Tubi originals include the Michelle Trachtenberg-hosted true-crime docuseries "Meet, Marry, Murder" and adult animated comedy "The Freak Brothers." "What you should assume is the lion’s share of Tubi’s programming going into the future will be [library programming]. Now, we’ve augmented that with originals but not the scale of the originals you’ve seen from the SVoD [players],” Nallen said.