In April 2020, with the advertising market collapsing and every large media company promising investors a prestige streaming service, Fox Corporation bought a free one for $440m. Tubi had no subscribers, because it did not sell subscriptions. It had a catalogue assembled from the parts of the film industry nobody was bidding for: horror, direct-to-video action, reality, 1970s Black cinema, and a very long tail of films that had never had a second life anywhere.
Six years later Fox has told investors that Tubi produces "10 times the revenue from when we started," in Lachlan Murdoch's phrase on the August earnings call. That revenue now runs above $1bn a year and grew more than 25 per cent across fiscal 2026, accelerating to 35 per cent in the June quarter. Viewing time rose 17 per cent. The platform closed the year with 110 million monthly active users. It was EBITDA-positive in all four quarters.
This is the part of the streaming war that the streaming war was not about.
The arithmetic of buying wide
Tubi carries roughly 375,000 movies and television episodes. Netflix's American catalogue runs to about 8,000 titles. That ratio — nearly fifty to one — is not a content strategy anyone arrived at by accident. It is the consequence of a different question. A subscription service asks what it must buy so that a household will pay $18 a month. An advertising service asks what it can buy so that some household, somewhere, will watch something for free.
Those questions produce opposite spending patterns. The subscription answer concentrates money: a handful of very expensive shows, each of which must justify itself against churn. The advertising answer disperses it: small sums across an enormous number of titles, where a film that finds ten thousand viewers has still earned its licence fee because the licence fee was small.
The San Francisco Standard reported on Wednesday that Tubi's buyers work explicitly on that long tail — horror, reality, Black action thrillers, blaxploitation — alongside 25,000 videos from some 400 online creators. Anjali Sud, who became chief executive in 2023 after running Vimeo, has defended the character of the place against the instinct to make it respectable: "You don't want to take the Tubi out of Tubi."
What Nielsen sees
Nielsen put Tubi at 2 per cent of all United States television viewing in July. That is more than HBO Max. It is more than Apple TV+. It is roughly what a mid-sized cable network would have counted as a very good month a decade ago, and it belongs to a service most people in the business of television still describe as a curiosity.
The month's wider picture matters for reading that number honestly. Streaming took 49 per cent of all US television viewing in July, a record; broadcast took 19.5 per cent and cable 18.7 per cent. YouTube alone took 14.2 per cent. Peacock, boosted by the World Cup and Love Island, took 2.6 per cent. Tubi is not the largest free service and it is not the largest anything. It is simply profitable at a scale its cost base was never designed to need.
Fox's own results show how the pieces fit. The company finished fiscal 2026 with revenue of $17.13bn, up 5 per cent, and EBITDA of $3.9bn, up 8 per cent. The June quarter carried the FIFA men's World Cup, which lifted quarterly revenue 28 per cent to $4.21bn and advertising revenue 78 per cent. Tubi carried 20 million viewers of the tournament. But Fox's point to analysts was that Tubi's growth held up outside the sporting calendar, which is the difference between a good month and a business.
The bit that is not obvious
Free streaming is usually explained as a downgrade: what people watch when they have cancelled everything else. The evidence is less tidy. Tubi's audience skews young and skews toward households that were never in the pay-television system at all, which is precisely the cohort the subscription services have spent a decade and tens of billions of dollars failing to convert.
There is also a structural asymmetry that rarely gets said plainly. A subscription service's marginal viewer costs it money — more streaming, more bandwidth, no additional revenue until the next renewal. An advertising service's marginal viewer is revenue. Every incremental hour on Tubi has an ad load attached to it. That is why viewing time up 17 per cent shows up as revenue up 35 per cent rather than as a cost line.
What happens next is a distribution question
Fox expects to complete its acquisition of Roku in the first half of 2027. Nielsen's own analysis suggests the combination would rank third among US media distributors by viewing share. It would also put Tubi in front of a hundred million-plus screens by default, and set it beside the Roku Channel, which is a direct competitor running the same playbook.
That is the open question. Tubi's advantage to date has been that it was cheap to run, ignored by the people it was taking audience from, and free of the obligation to produce a hit. Distribution at Roku scale changes the first of those, ends the second, and tempts management into the third. Sud's line about not taking the Tubi out of Tubi is the right instinct and the hardest one to hold once a business clears a billion dollars and acquires a corporate parent's expectations along with its balance sheet.
The number worth watching is not monthly users, which will rise mechanically with distribution. It is cost of content per viewing hour. If that starts climbing, Tubi is becoming the thing it beat.
Tubi's catalogue size, content mix, leadership history, the Netflix title comparison and the July Nielsen share are from The San Francisco Standard's report of 23 September 2026 by way of its interviews with chief executive Anjali Sud and chief product officer Mike Bidgoli. Revenue growth, monthly active users, viewing time and the EBITDA-positive quarters are from Fox Corporation's fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2026 results of 6 August 2026 and the accompanying earnings call, as reported by TheWrap, TVNewsCheck and CNBC; Lachlan Murdoch's "10 times the revenue" remark is from that call. The $440m purchase price is as reported at the time of the April 2020 acquisition. July 2026 Gauge figures for total streaming, broadcast, cable, YouTube and Peacock are from Nielsen's July report of The Gauge. Fox has not disclosed Tubi's revenue or profit as a separate reported segment, and the platform's cost of content is not published. The comparison of per-title economics is our own.
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