I recently spoke at a conference in Toronto about the free, ad-supported streaming platform Tubi. The theme of the conference was “Bad Objects,” and so my approach was to think about what makes a platform “good” or “bad” according to different vectors of taste, and Tubi was the obvious case study, with its reputation as the lowbrow underdog, the “streaming service of the people.”
Of course, while Tubi is often associated with schlock enthusiasts, B-movie fans, and other eccentricities and curios, it has a massive library that likewise appeals to my 80-something grandmother, who watches it endlessly. It boasts having more than 50,000 movies and TV shows, and over 60 million active users. Its indiscriminate breadth is its beauty.
Still, its lowbrow bona fides are clear, as many users will joke about coming across a movie that has seemingly been uploaded from some random person’s VCR tape, so if we’re thinking about “bad taste,” it’s not just in the kind of content people like to visit Tubi to find, it’s also the unknown provenance of its uploads, and how you never know where it’s coming from or why it looks that way. It is a world of vast unknown riches.
It’s also, crucially, the rare streaming service that is free and ad-supported, itself suggesting a lesser experience as compared to more prestige-seeking platforms like Netflix. Tubi is more like a home to all, the highbrow and the lowbrow, the arthouse and the bargain basement. Still, it uses its reputation to its benefit, advertising itself as a place where you can fall down rabbit holes and discover things you didn’t even know you were looking for.
Of course, both Netflix and Disney+, leaders in the global streaming economy, have introduced cheaper ad-supported versions of their platforms as the industry faces challenging questions about its future as growth slows or reverses. Suddenly, what was once seen as beneath them is a last-ditch effort to draw in more subscribers, and apparently Netflix is even considering a free tier, as well. If anything, Tubi increasingly seems like the influential trailblazer as other established brands take strategies from their playbook.
But perhaps what is most useful here is thinking about Tubi’s status as the scrappy underdog, the lesser-known little guy who gets all this free publicity from its users because they identify with the plight of a smaller fish in a giant pond. Its fans often talk about how they fear Tubi is at risk of being shuttered every day, a sort of ramshackle operation that is getting away with something.
But, in reality, Tubi is a subsidiary of the Fox Corporation, and the boss is business titan Rupert Murdoch.
Fox bought the company in 2020 for $440 million. Tubi is, in Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch’s words, “a substantial base from which we will drive long-term growth in the direct-to-consumer arena.” Totally, that is how humans speak! Moreover, it is a way for Fox to get into the streaming industry, and a way to bolster its relationship to advertising partners.
This is important to remember in the context of a streaming ecosystem where data is king. In February, Fox reportedly turned down offers of $2 billion to buy Tubi, which is over 4 times what Fox paid for it, so clearly they see great value in Tubi, the data it collects, and its ads business. At a time when other streamers are struggling, free ad-supported models like Tubi’s seem to be blowing up, and Fox is keen to keep their stake in place because it translates into ad revenue and data extraction on its users and the ads they see.
To wit, Tubi has enough money to pay for a (kinda clever) Super Bowl ad.
You have to wonder what discussions took place to make Mr. and Mrs. Smith the movie they chose to go with.
The point is, I think we can say that Tubi is a striking example of platform strategy, where it emphasizes a somewhat overstated rendering of lowbrow taste cultures to appeal to the masses within a shrinking and increasingly complex streaming landscape.
Their message is: no bells and whistles here, no pretensions, they are truly the people’s platform.
I’ve written previously about what we might think of as the other end of the streaming spectrum, the platform strategy behind something like The Criterion Channel, which serves a comparably niche audience. It charges more and has no ads, with a focus on curation and themed programming rather than personalization, building a feeling of artistic patronage through its tastemaking.
In comparison, Tubi charts a much different path, but one that likewise plans for the future. For Tubi, the future ought to look like what it is offering now, a deliberate clash between the high and lowbrow, and enough ads and data to sustain long-term growth and stability.
I have a preoccupation—or obsession—with the future as a concept and as a principle, and who gets to decide what the future will be like. If we’re to consider what makes for a good or bad platform, we should keep in mind what we want from platforms to begin with, and this is all part of the story of thinking about technology being used in different, better ways depending on what we decide the future should be.
And finally, if Tubi, which I do love, is truly to be considered a “bad platform,” it’s not because of all the shoddy video ports or shitty horror movies it hosts, it would be because of its ads and data-based business model and who it makes money for.
Ephemera
Ryan Broderick has a great Substack called Garbage Day where he talks about internet things very smartly. In his most recent edition, he talks about a few things that make me feel insane (this is normal for reading his rundowns of insane stuff online). He talked about a woman who might be playing a character to upset people but also there’s not really a difference between the character and the person; he talked about the Michelle Tandler incident (if you don’t know what this is, please don’t find out by clicking this link); he talked about a guy on TikTok who makes increasingly elaborate meals for mice. The point is, Broderick’s newsletter, while excellent, usually leaves me reflecting on the basic fact that I don’t think we’re supposed to encounter dozens of things every day where the only reasonable reaction is “I don’t know what it is that I’m looking at here.” I have that thought maybe a hundred times on a bad day. This isn’t just classic concern over information overload, it’s the seemingly unavoidable slurry of inexplicable stimuli, searching for meaning but generally divorced from any recognizable reality. I simply don’t know what I’m looking at, and at a certain point, I think our brains are going to collectively leak out of our ears, and I’m not sure what the solution is. Something to think about…
Parix Marx wrote for Jacobin, taking the words out of my mouth, about the nationalist project of banning TikTok.
One of Letterboxd superstar pd187’s best lists, I think, is “technorotic sex thrillers of the 80s, 90s & y2k.com: PCs, cyber, VR, cellphones+new communications tech”. Basically you can just add them all to your watchlist.
Song Recommendation: “Alone Together” — Chet Baker
i never reply to newsletters because idk i just don't but i liked this a lot. lots of food for thought here.