“That was a game that everyone was playing,” Parlapiano says, “and it was a race to the bottom to catch Netflix.”
Tubi was founded in 2014 by Farhad Massoudi, an engineer with a degree from UC Berkeley, as an ad-tech platform for studios to be able to monetize their content. The goal, at least the way Massoudi first envisioned it, was to build backend infrastructure for studios to have their own streaming partner.
But Massoudi realized that scaling that version of his business, then named AdRise, would be too difficult. So he pivoted to an aggregated white label product via licensing deals. At the time, Netflix was coasting on the success of House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, breakout originals that set a new benchmark for streamers. Massoudi felt licensing could be Tubi’s bread and butter. He wanted it to be the company’s first real pure play as a streaming service in the market, with a specific focus on lower-cost content to keep profits healthy. And for eight years, that was the model.
By the end of 2022, as the era of Peak TV came and went, Massoudi was plagued by questions of expansion. What did Tubi stand for? Where could it carve out a unique path forward to compete in a crowded ecosystem that now included both major players—Apple TV+, Amazon, Hulu—and dozens of niche streamers like Shudder and Zeus. The streaming wars would soon be over; how would Tubi position itself in the era ahead?
Similar to YouTube, Tubi adopted a creator-friendly model. From a content producer standpoint, it was “very accommodating,” says J. Christopher Hamilton, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University who previously worked as entertainment executive at Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery. It was Black viewers, Hamilton says, who introduced Tubi to a wider viewership during its rebrand. “That’s largely why Tubi has been able to amass a degree of momentum compared to some of its competitors.”
As the company attempted to reset, it realized it could take advantage of the watercooler moments that were happening online. In 2023, several grainy, poorly-shot films found passionate audiences on TikTok and X. The films—with mocking titles like Amityville in the Hood and Cocaine Cougar—went viral across social media thanks to a cohort of creatives, many of whom were from the Detroit area. All of the projects were self-funded. “Tubi isn’t just a streaming service for fans to enjoy,” journalist Phil Lewis wrote of the trend, “it has become an outlet for independent Black filmmakers to showcase their art.”
And just like that, all eyes were on Tubi.
Fox had a similar rise to prominence in the 1990s in terms of its programming. “When Fox launched it started out distributing Black-targeted content that was steeped in the community,” Hamilton adds. Tubi was acquired by Fox in 2020 for $440 million, and by June of 2023, Massoudi had exited the company. “A lot of the success of the network happened on the heels of Black programming and Black audiences. Once they were at a certain level of success, they pivoted to more well-heeled demographics, which was white men. The playbook is very similar now.”
