Tubi TV sets Australia debut

Tubi was launched in the US in 2014

Ad-supported VoD (AVoD) platform Tubi TV launches in Australia this Sunday, offering nearly 7,000 movies and TV series.

Australia is the San Francisco-based platform’s first market outside North America. Tubi CEO Farhad Massoudi told C21 he chose Australia because it has among the highest penetration rates of Netflix subscribers outside the US and is a mature advertising market.

The free service has secured Australian rights to a raft of movies including 3:10 to Yuma, The Blair Witch Project, Kickboxer and Stranger Than Fiction, with such titles as Dirty Dancing, The Grudge, Requiem for a Dream, Reservoir Dogs, Saw, Traffic and Young Guns to roll out over the next six months.

“We’re excited to offer Tubi in Australia as the first of many launch initiatives to advance our global footprint,” Massoudi said. “We see Tubi as complementary to other streaming services as linear TV viewing continues to decline and on-demand viewing grows. We have the far largest library and it will be personalised to each customer’s tastes.”

Referring to looming competition down under from Disney+, Apple TV, and WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal’s streaming services, he added: “It’s ludicrous to think the average household will subscribe to Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, HBO and all these others. The average household has about two subscription services.”

Launched in 2014, Tubi has content deals spanning 15,000 titles with more than 200 suppliers, including MGM and Lionsgate (which are both investors in the privately held company), NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, Paramount Pictures and Miramax.

The AVoD service offers some Australian films in North America, and while it has not yet acquired any local content for Oz, Massoudi said he planned to do so, adding that he intended to quickly ramp up the Australian content in size and quality to approach that of its home service.

Tubi reported it had more than 20 million monthly active users in May and that customers watched 94 million hours of content that month, a company record.

Australians can access Tubi via Telstra TV, Tubi.TV, Internet-connected screens including Samsung TVs, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Google Chromecast and Apple iOS as well as Android tablets and smartphones. The service will also be available via game consoles including PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.