Football fans who don’t have basic cable — or a digital antennae — will be able to stream the Super Bowl for free on the Fox-owned Tubi streaming service.
Fox, which will broadcast Super Bowl LIX between the two-time defending champion Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday — wants to provide further exposure to its free, ad-supported content platform — which made headlines during last year’s big game with a prank commercial that made it seem like viewers had sat on their remote.
“This time it’s less about shocking viewers and more about being in our credibility era – being a streamer that has the chops to stream the Super Bowl,” said Nicole Parlapiano, Tubi’s chief marketing officer, according to a CNBC report.
Fox has already uploaded past Super Bowl games and halftime shows to Tubi as it seeks to bring a larger sports audience to the platform, which it bought in 2020 for about $440 million.
While Fox’s competitors have launched their own paid subscription platforms – like Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max and Disney’s Hulu and Disney+ – Fox has stayed with just Tubi, betting on the app’s growth potential.
“Tubi went from virtually nothing four years ago to a meaningful number for us,” Fox Chief Financial Officer Steve Tomsic said during the company’s earnings call in November.
On Tuesday, Fox said it will launch a subscription streaming service by the end of the year.
Unlike Max, Hulu, Disney+ or Netflix, Tubi is completely free and ad-supported. It’s available on streaming devices, TVs and mobile phones.
Like a traditional TV guide, it has a list of channels, as well as a library of movies and TV shows.
Free platforms do not offer as much original content as their paid rivals – and they rarely feature live coverage of major sporting events, so the Super Bowl is a huge step for the relatively small service.
In 2022, Tubi’s revenue exceeded Fox Entertainment’s advertising revenue for the first time.
The following year, Nielsen included Tubi for the first time in a streaming viewership roundup, saying the app had reached 1% of total TV viewing minutes.
As of December, Tubi accounted for 1.7% of viewing minutes, according to Nielsen.
Tubi recently hit 97 million monthly active viewers, according to Parlapiano. The majority of its audience does not have cable TV, and is largely made up of millennials and Gen Zers, and females, according to the report.
″[Fox has] avoided the billions of dollars in losses that other media companies have invested building out their own streaming platforms,” Robert Fishman, an analyst at MoffettNathanson, told CNBC.
Since live sports are not usually offered on free services, the Super Bowl has the potential to bring Fox’s Tubi notable exposure.
“The idea of using the biggest and most powerful sports event is of course going to bring attention to Tubi,” Fishman said.
Fox previously tried to get involved in the sports streaming arena, teaming up with Disney’s ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery on Venu Sports, which was scrapped earlier this year ahead of its launch.
