Here’s a fun tidbit to toss out at your next dinner party: Tubi is home to the biggest content library of all the streamers. That’s right, the one-time underdog of streaming now claims it has more content than Netflix.
Tubi has over 275,000 titles from every era and genre of film and television. At least, that's what the company says; it’s nearly impossible to verify given the library’s size. Offerings span cult classics (Cooley High), ’90s heist movies (The Thomas Crown Affair), and everything in between—anime, Westerns, French New Wave, reality TV, popcorn horror. You name it and Tubi (most likely) has it. Yes, even Leprechaun 4: Lost In Space.
There’s a decent chance you’ve heard some of this before. Tubi’s free, ad-supported streaming service is having a moment. In the last 12 months it has simulcast the Super Bowl, along with Fox Sports, its corporate partner, and inked deals with the WWE—to air Evolve, a new weekly show of next-gen wrestlers trying to break out of the developmental league—and The Black List, to help overlooked creators churn out scripts. Tubi is also more popular than it’s ever been in markets like Mexico, where it is the exclusive provider of the Concacaf Champions Cup.
But despite its deep Rolodex of content and dedicated viewership—97 million monthly active users and counting—the platform continues to face poor public perception.
There are a seemingly infinite number of things to watch on Tubi—and a lot of it, by prestige streaming standards, would earn a failing grade. Tubi’s zero-restrictions approach to licensing has turned the streamer into “a bit of a social punching bag,” says Nicole Parlapiano, the platform’s chief marketing officer.
Tubi has been called everything from the “Criterion Collection but for really bad movies” to a platform for “D-tier straight-to-DVD shit movies.” It has stagy revenge thrillers like Bottle Girls Gone Bad and an undercooked remake of the 1976 horror flick I Spit on Your Grave. “Tubi got some of the most toxic low-budget movies I’ve ever seen,” @slscolours posted on X recently. “U can literally be [an] actor on there with no experience.” (Many barbs directed at the company, it’s worth noting, seem to be shared with love.)
But there is a reason—and a pretty radical one—why many “low-budget” movies are featured on the streamer. “We’re not here to tell you what is good, what is Emmy Award–winning,” Parlapiano says. “Listen, we have independent films that have really bad stunts. They’re campy. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We don’t have that veneer, and we never want to have it.”
The streaming wars were about more than dominance. Maybe more than anything, the battle over the future of TV was about who represented its most idyllic version. Where other streamers are often concerned with appealing to the widest audience possible or reflecting its tastes back to members through the originals it acquires, Tubi decided that was not the route it wanted to take.