FEBRUARY 6, 2025

Welcome back to Buffering, where American democracy may be crumbling before our eyes, but at least we’ve got lots of streaming television to take our minds off it all! And speaking of distractions, this week’s Buffering is about one of the biggest diversions of them all: the Super Bowl. Tubi will be streaming the big game for free Sunday, which is a big deal for cord-cutters, but an even bigger deal for the Fox-owned streamer. I talked to an exec there about what to expect. Enjoy the game, if you can.

—Joe Adalian, West Coast editor, Vulture

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Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Tubi

Tubi crashed Super Bowl LVII back in 2023 with that insanely viral ad which made it appear as if it had interrupted coverage of the Big Game. More than just a buzzy moment, the stunt served as a sort of coming out party for the Fox-owned free streamer and helped turbocharge its already-considerable growth. Two years later, Tubi is once again looking to the Super Bowl to help it gain some yardage in the streaming wars — and its plans this time are far more ambitious.

For starters, rather than pretending to hijack the game, this time Tubi will stream all of Fox Sports’ coverage of the Super Bowl, live and in glorious 4K, with no cable login or credit card needed (because, yes, like everything else on Tubi, the game will be free). And this won’t be some alternative version of the Chiefs-Eagles rematch, a la ESPN’s ManningCast or the kid-friendly version of the game Nickelodeon offered last year: Tubi viewers will see the exact same Super Bowl LIX telecast as folks watching on Fox via cable or antenna, minus the local ad breaks. Tubi will also stream the Spanish-language telecast of the game seen on Fox Deportes.

But while the action on the gridiron won’t change, Tubi isn’t treating Sunday as a simple simulcast from its larger sibling. Much the way 2023’s Super Bowl ads were designed to announce its arrival as a serious player on the streaming playing field, Tubi is eyeing this year as an opportunity to recruit new users and introduce its existing customer base to new content. To get a sense of exactly how it plans to do that, Buffering recently connected with Tubi chief marketing officer Nicole Parlapiano. She briefed us on what to expect from the streamer’s first Super Bowl Sunday and why it’s such a big deal for the platform.

Tubi’s simulcast Sunday will mark the first time the Super Bowl has been available for free on a major general entertainment streaming platform. In 2022 and 2024, NBC and CBS required consumers to sign up for sister platforms Paramount+ or Peacock, respectively, in order to watch the game. And in 2023, although Fox didn’t require a cable login or any other sort of payment to stream the game, it put that year’s contest on its Fox Sports app, which by definition is aimed at regular consumers of the NFL and other sports. By contrast, according to Parlapiano, streaming Super Bowl LIX on Tubi “is definitely more of a play to your casual fans who may or may not watch” football regularly — but still have some interest in joining in on what’s become an unofficial holiday. “I’m an NFL fan who has YouTube TV and my husband has NFL Sunday Ticket. I don't expect that cohort to be viewing Tubi,” Parlapiano says. “But Tubi viewers, I think like 77 percent of them have no cable. And the Super Bowl is the only time as a country where we all come together and lock in on something, whether it's for the ads, the halftime show, or just being able to talk about it with coworkers the next day. It's actually the ultimate FOMO moment, and this is about bringing more people in to be a part of that moment.”

Indeed, Tubi’s demo profile of younger viewers, most of whom are cord-cutters or cord-nevers, is one reason why, per Parlapiano, it wasn’t difficult to get Fox Sports execs or the NFL on board with the idea of putting the Super Bowl on a FAST service for the first time. “I think strategically it just made sense for both the NFL and Fox to say, ‘We have this streamer that has this [demographic] that is the group to get to watch that night so that we can make this as big as possible’,” she says. “It’s about incremental audience,” rather than potentially cannibalizing ratings for the Fox broadcast.

Tubi’s simulcast of Sunday’s event will include the full, five-and-a-half hour Fox Sports pregame show that begins at 1 p.m. ET, as well the trophy ceremony once the game ends. But the streamer will also be targeting those “casual” fans Parlapiano mentioned earlier — aka more traditional Tubi viewers — with content aimed just at them. A few hours before kickoff, at 3:30 p.m., Tubi will offer Tubi Red Carpet at Super Bowl, a three-hour livestream from New Orleans hosted by model and social media star Olivia Culpo. She’ll be joined by several correspondents who will serve up reports about the celebs, fashion, and fan activities around the game, along with pre-taped reports from various New Orleans landmarks. “It’s for anyone who wants to just get a pulse on what's going on the ground on New Orleans that day, what celebrities are there, what people are eating, what they're wearing — the cultural event of it all,” Parlapiano explains, adding that Fox Sports’ pre-game and the Tubi red carpet show will be given equal billing on the platform.

Meanwhile, while the Fox broadcast network will be urging its viewers to stay tuned for the season premiere of its Rob Lowe–hosted game show The Floor, Tubi is adapting a move from the linear TV playback by using the Super Bowl to hype an important new piece of programming. Immediately following the end of the trophy ceremony on Sunday, Tubi will auto-play the first episode of The Z-Suite, a new scripted comedy starring Gilmore Girls icon Lauren Graham and Superstore veteran Nico Santos. While its first two episodes debuted on Tubi today (Feb. 6), Parlapiano says Tubi will use Sunday’s game to “re-premiere” the show, including airing a promo for the show during Fox’s Super Bowl Sunday coverage. While Tubi has produced many original movies, this is the streamer’s “first time doing” a scripted comedy series, Parlapiano says. Debuting around the Super Bowl won’t guarantee an audience over the long-term — new episodes will drop weekly through mid-March — but it does offer the series the sort of marketing exposure few streaming series get these days. (And for anyone who’s worried about missing The Floor on Fox, take note: Each new episode of the quizzer streams on Tubi eight days after its network premiere.)

While Tubi’s fake takeover of the 2023 Super Bowl got more attention (and social media buzz), the streamer also scored major points (and critical acclaim) with a longer spot in which giant rabbits threw viewers down literal rabbit holes. Following that up in 2025 is a tall order, but Tubi will be making a go at it — though Parlapiano is trying to temper expectations in terms of breaking through with another cultural moment. “As much as I'd love to go insanely viral again, that's not necessarily my intent this year,” she told me. With the new ad, “I’m trying to do something a little bit different. Brands evolve, and we're still going to have fun.But going viral is not really what's going to propel the business. I'm looking to instill more credibility in the business.”

So what should audiences expect from the Tubi Super Bowl campaign? Unlike so many companies which now release their full game day ads days or weeks ahead of time, Parlapiano still believes in keeping things a surprise. All that she and Tubi have revealed about the spot has been a 10-second teaser showing expectant parents at an ultrasound and a doctor telling them their baby was going to be in a “big game commercial.” Parlapiano suggests the teaser alludes to the fact that Tubi is “giving birth to a new character” with the campaign. “The spot is tapping into our Tubi genre-lovers,” she says, referring to the many and extremely random niche content categories on the platform. “People still feel pressure to love something that's super popular — but not on Tubi. This spot brings that ethos to life: [Tubi] is the place to explore the things you truly love, even if it's something as obscure as Nunsploitation, which is a genre on Tubi.”

Parlapiano says the spot will expand on the idea that Tubi “has become this place for people who want to escape” the Peak TV vibe where watching the latest prestige series often felt like homework. “There are shows out there with critical acclaim, awards, and podcasts dedicated to breaking down every episode because they're quite frankly so complicated a regular viewer can't tell what's actually going on,” she says. “While the cultural significance of some of these shows is really high, not everyone's watching the latest, greatest thing that those of us on the coasts are obsessed with. Younger viewers, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, say they're just tired of keeping up with what's trendy and what's popular. We have data that shows 82 percent of them take pride in their guilty pleasures, and we want them to feel proud about that on Tubi. Being anti-FOMO is a big part of our brand. That's really what's inspired the campaign that we created with [the ad agency] Mischief for the Super Bowl this year.” (And yes, it’s a bit ironic that Tubi is using an event Parlapiano herself says is Peak Monoculture to hype a service dedicated to being the exact opposite, but there’s a rich tradition of Super Bowl advertisers using the game this way, going all the way back to Apple’s iconic “1984” spot.)

Meanwhile, in addition to the official ad that will air on Fox Sunday, Parlapiano also hints she could have something planned similar to the so-called “interface interruption” that went viral in 2023. “There might be something else that I have up my sleeve that is a nice little surprise,” she says. “We'll see. I never really know until the last minute if some of the other stuff I'm trying to do is going to clear or not.” Either way, Parlapiano says that while Sunday’s campaign will still “have our signature wacky vibe” — like those giant rabbits from two years ago — expect things to feel a bit more grounded overall. “This year, it’s less about shocking viewers and more about connecting with them, and helping them understand why people love Tubi,” she says.

While Peacock and Prime Video have proven more than capable of handling a big surge in viewership with their telecasts of giant NFL games, Netflix’s recent woes streaming last fall’s big Tyson-Paul boxing match put a spotlight on what happens when a streamer gets a taste of too much popularity with a live event. Parlapiano, however, sounds pretty confident that Tubi and its partners at Fox Sports won’t have any issues this weekend. “Fox has been doing live sports forever and they've been streaming them on other properties,” she says. “So, a lot of what we have gone through on the tech side has been leveraging that expertise of the Fox Sports tech team. This is what they do all day every day, and we've been working closely to make sure that all that is in place for the Tubi infrastructure.” And while there’s no way of knowing for sure just how many new viewers the Super Bowl will bring to Tubi, Parlapiano says she thinks the platform will be able to handle it, and with “the lowest latency in the industry,” referring to the lag time associated with streaming a live event. “This Fox team streamed [the Super Bowl] on the Fox Sports app two years ago. While we are expecting higher volume, it's not volume that they haven't seen before. Things can always happen, but we've prepared for this.”

More importantly, Parlapiano says Tubi is now mature enough as a platform to handle an event as big as the Super Bowl– something she might not have said circa 2023. “Two years ago, we were just stressed out about putting out an ad that didn’t embarrass everybody. We just weren't there,” Parlapiano says. But Tubi has exploded from around 64 million monthly active users in 2022 to a base last year of 97 million, while total time spent streaming has doubled over the same period, to 10 billion hours in 2024. What’s more, some of Tubi’s original movies have landed on Luminate’s streaming data charts — a sign they’re breaking through to a wider audience — while the company is now producing original series such as The Z-Suite which would be at home on a bigger streamer or basic cable network. “The business has evolved so much — from a marketing, tech and product standpoint — that we can confidently deliver on this,” Parlapiano says, taking a beat to reflect on how much has changed since 2023. “If you told me two years ago that Tubi would be streaming the Super Bowl, I would've fallen right out of my chair.”

It’s earnings season, which means we’re getting some insights into how various entertainment companies are thinking about the performance of their streaming platforms. You’ve probably read news stories on some of these reports by now, but here are a few smaller details that caught my eye:

➽ Disney’s Bob Iger signaled that Disney is (finally) getting serious about improving the user experience of Disney+, which has evolved painfully slowly since the service signed on five years ago. “One of the things that we are very, very mindful of is that the home screen experience that consumers have has to be more dynamic,” Iger told investors Wednesday. While calling the D+ homepage “elegant looking” — I’d respectfully disagree, Mr. Iger — he also correctly noted it is “fairly static in nature,” which is accurate. “The more dynamic it is, the more people are drawn into it, the more people use it and the more people don't basically close the app out and go elsewhere,” Iger said. “That's a big deal.” The CEO added that Adam Smith, Disney’s recently hired chief product officer, has already taken some steps to evolve the app, and promised much more is on the way. “I’d say that by the end of the year, there will be significant progress made,” Iger vowed.

➽ Over at Fox Corp., Lachlan Murdoch made news Tuesday by revealing his company plans to launch a subscription streaming product featuring content from Fox Sports, Fox News and perhaps Fox Entertainment by year’s end. As noted above, Fox has had plenty of success with free streaming via Tubi. And it continues to do well with the cable bundle (thanks mostly to Fox News’s stranglehold on about 50 percent of the country). Murdoch says the still-vague streamer “will be a package of our existing content on our existing brands targeted to consumers that are not currently in the bundle.” What this new streamer won’t be, apparently, is the Fox version of Peacock or Paramount+. “We do not expect any exclusive rights costs or additional incremental rights costs,” he said, ruling out the new service going after reruns of a show like The Office or making its own expensive scripted shows. “Our subscriber expectations will be modest, and we're going to price the service accordingly,” he said. I’m most interested in seeing whether this new service will offer live or same-day feeds of Fox News primetime shows, something the company has avoided until now to preserve the value of its cable business.

➽ Last week, Comcast said that Peacock didn’t grow at all in the last quarter of 2024, which was stunning to me given the last part of the year is usually boom times for streamers. (Netflix added nearly 20 million global subs last quarter.) Now, in fairness, the previous quarter included the Olympics, so in theory, it’s “good” news that Peacock didn’t lose ground after the halo from the Games faded and it increased its price. And yet, it’s worth noting that Peacock went from 34 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2024 to… 36 million in the third and fourth quarters of the year. It’s one thing for a Netflix or Disney+ to stay flat for a bit; they’ve already reached close to peak distribution in the U.S. But given all the big tentpoles Peacock offered last year — the Olympics, exclusive NFL games, election year simulcasts of SNL — it is pretty damning the service pretty much treaded water in terms of subscriber base. Peacock has made strides in programming for sure; I personally use the app almost daily (something that can’t be said for Netflix). But it’s hard to imagine all the buzz about Comcast bundling or merging Peacock with another streamer doesn’t happen sooner rather than later. In the meantime, season two of Poker Face can’t arrive soon enough.

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