Published June 15
When Tubi, the free streaming service owned by Fox, announced a creator program last June — bringing social video stars into its premium streaming environment — it was just a warm-up to the main event.
A year later, Tubi is making content creators a major part of its Word Cup Fox Hub, a destination for complementary programming to the FIFA World Cup, which kicked off last week. While Tubi livestreamed two opening matches, the hub is primarily offering ancillary content, including docuseries, talk shows and creator-led content from YouTubers Deestroying, Jesse “Jesser” Riedel and others.
Samuel Harowitz, senior vice president of content acquisitions and partnerships at Tubi, told The Current that the streamer wanted to serve a new kind of sports fandom with authentic creator content.
“Conversation around sport has changed so much in the last 10 to 15 years,” Harowitz said in an interview on Day 1 of the tournament. “We’ve started seeing trends around viewers following not just teams, but athletes, cultural moments; subject matter that is aligned with but somewhat to the side of sport.”
In fact, data shows that content consumption around a sport has skyrocketed in recent years. A recent Nielsen study found that 77% of U.S. soccer fans listen to sports podcasts for soccer news. Separate studies have found that sports documentary viewership has quadrupled since 2021, and that over half of casual sports fans watch sports documentaries.
To that end, Tubi’s creator-led live F1 altcast, The Fast Lane, provided a blueprint for its World Cup ambitions, offering commentary and insights from creators and experts during the Miami Grand Prix in May.
“The World Cup hub is an evolution of that thinking,” Harowitz said.
That evolution of sports fandom will be crucial in how Tubi assesses the strength of the hub. While Harowitz didn’t provide specific benchmarks, he noted several factors he’ll be paying attention to, like engagement; migrating viewers from the live matches to other programming; and pulling viewers into the Tubi ecosystem who wouldn’t typically be there (and keeping them there). And if Tubi likes what it sees, it could inform its sports and live event strategy in the future.
“When we boil all those things down, are we able to prove that doing this at scale for other tentpole sports moments makes sense for us?” he said. “How do we continue to support those global or national cultural moments that exist in and around sporting events?”
The strategy also reflects a broader shift in the creator marketplace, in which many are broadening their reach and audience beyond social video platforms.
If platforms like YouTube launch a creator, then places like Tubi can nurture them. According to Harowitz, a third of Tubi’s 100 million monthly active users are not on YouTube.
“The thing that both refines our strategy and demonstrates the value of coming to a platform like Tubi is the scale that we have,” he said.
“We’ve also been able to achieve more ambitious work with creators,” he added. “Series that have real structure and feel like premium TV, as opposed to short-form content. We’ve also learned that creative control and ownership is important to creators, something they don’t always have working with even long-form, traditional SVOD services.”
