Tubi Scored a Big Chunk of Super Bowl Viewers. It Wants Them to Stick Around
The large subset of Super Bowl viewers who watched the game on Tubi came as a surprise to many — but not those within the streamer itself.
“It was in line with what we thought we’d get,” Nicole Parlapiano, Tubi’s chief marketing officer, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We had existing comps from prior Super Bowls that we were building off of, and we had a pretty sophisticated model of what we thought we could get.”
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What Tubi got was an average of 13.6 million viewers for its livestream of Fox’s Super Bowl LIX telecast Sunday, based on internal and Adobe Analytics data. That’s more than 10 percent of the record-setting total audience (127.7 million) for the game and the largest streaming figure to date for a Super Bowl. It also almost doubled the streaming viewership for Fox’s last Super Bowl in 2023, which the Fox Sports app carried.
Parlapiano says Tubi targeted more casual fans and people who don’t have a cable or satellite subscription for its Super Bowl stream, figuring that a dedicated NFL viewer was likely already to have a way to watch the game. “We wanted make sure that, if we were doing this together, that it would be additive and not just making people decide where to watch it,” she says. It’s also likely that Tubi’s audience profile was somewhat different than that of the main broadcast. The streamer doesn’t yet have detailed demographic breakdowns for the Super Bowl, but Parlapiano notes that almost half of its users are adults under 45 — considerably younger than the average broadcast viewer.
Tubi’s next challenge is convincing new users who came in for the Super Bowl to stick around. In January, the streamer disclosed that it had about 97 million monthly active users, up from 78 million in mid-2024.
Tubi does offer a handful of smaller live sports — notably Liga MX soccer from Mexico and NBA G League games — along with on-demand viewing of past Fox Sports programming and a host of sports movies and docuseries. “When you have a big hockey-stick moment [of growth] like this, the hope is it changes the baseline of the business forever,” says Parlapiano. “We did invest in a lot of programming during this time to make sure that there are compelling things for folks to watch after the Super Bowl, whether it’s something like Dune — big, shiny Hollywood blockbusters that are in their first licensing window in an ad-supported environment, or originals that we have invested in. We wanted to make sure that we have our best foot forward to retain and bring people back.”
What’s not likely to happen, though, is Tubi regularly streaming marquee live sports. Fox is preparing to launch a dedicated sports streaming platform of its own, for one thing, and “It’s just too expensive for ad-supported streamers to get into that game in earnest,” Parlapiano says.
Tubi will, however, continue leaning into sports-adjacent programming. “On the sports side, our strategy is much more where sports meets culture, and I would argue that Super Bowl is not just a sporting event, it’s a cultural event,” says Parlapiano. “People are watching for the halftime show, the commercials, who’s there. So it felt right for the Tubi viewer, because they are much more entertainment focused. We have projects that we’ve invested in that sit in the cross of sports and culture. When it comes to relationship with Fox Sports, there is an incredible opportunity to do more shoulder programming around the athletes and the stories to support their bigger live events.”
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