From The Ringer:
Tubi is, however, growing in popularity. Launched in 2014, it has progressed from a vague slush pile—something akin to the discount DVD bin at Walmart circa 2002—into more of a stimulating, treasure-laden maze for real heads seeking a hit of cinematic surprise that more carefully manicured collections can’t offer.
Last year, the company announced that it had about 74 million monthly active users. It has surpassed more costly options like Paramount+ and Peacock and isn’t far behind The Walt Disney Company+.
“These #FAST channels are kind of having a moment,” says J.D. Connor, a professor of cinematic arts at the University of Southern California. “Tubi has positioned itself as explicitly the Gen Z version of these [free streamers]. They’re adamant that this is not a kind of play for the cheap old people who just want to watch old shows that they’re familiar with. And their recent rebrand reeks of a #marketing firm that told them, ‘This is the Gen Z appeal.’ ”
Tubi appeals to more than just zoomers, though, and there’s significant overlap between its users and those who pay for Netflix, HBO Max Hulu, Peacock, or any of the other formidable paid-subscription #streaming entities.
Part of it is certainly how it approximates the foregone experience of combing through an oversized video store, or trawling the depths of cable broadcasting, and finding in that morass of mediocrity a gem of screen history and vision. Some things feel better when you have to work for them
It would be wrong to argue that Tubi’s primary appeal is that it has good movies. Instead, its primary appeal is that it has lots of movies, and its budget-minded anti-curation approach to arranging them enhances a sense of odyssey. “When you’ve got the rights to that many titles, it’s not about frictionlessness,” Connor says. “It’s about strangeness and happenstance. You do have to go look for things.”
Offerings more pleasurable than fantastic cinema, for many Tubi heads, are the curious misses. Not total failures, per se; not terrible movies—though there are plenty of those on Tubi—but the pictures just a few shades shy of any kind of remembrance.
The result is less of a house style and more of an endless churn of cinematic penny stocks. It’s intellectual property arbitrage, an audiovisual flea market of which none of its organizers really understand the breadth and abnormality. The company’s philosophy seems to be that if you build a “video store the size of today,” people will come, and they will sort it out for themselves.
What Tubi does ostensibly pay a little more intentionality to is its original programming offerings. Since 2021, it’s released a new movie of its own roughly once per week. Most of them are bad, and obviously so from the titles alone. It’s mostly horror and thriller shlock, junk food for people who just need their screens to produce colors and noise.
M.S. in Real Estate Candidate (‘24) at NYU Schack Institute | Asset Management Intern @ PEAK
2moExciting experience 🔥💯💯