A Touchdown for Tubi? Fox’s Super Bowl Simulcast Hopes to Score With Cord Nevers

In 2023, Tubi made its Super Bowl debut with a viral ad that had viewers questioning whether their feed went down in the middle of a face-off between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles.

“The goal on that night was just to make people aware of what Tubi was. We had very low awareness,” chief marketing officer Nicole Parlapiano told TheWrap. “I just wanted people to know our name, and I wanted to stand out.” 

Two years later, the Chiefs and Eagles are facing off yet again — but Tubi is in a very different place, simulcasting the big game in 4K for the first time as part of a Fox Sports takeover on Feb. 9. 

The free, ad-supported streaming platform, which was acquired by Fox Corp. for $440 million in 2020, has grown to 97 million monthly active users — who streamed 10 billion hours of programming in 2024 — and is on track to cross the $1 billion revenue mark this fiscal year. But it still remains unprofitable, reporting a deficit of close to $240 million for Fox’s fiscal year 2024. 

Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said Tuesday that the platform saw ad sales growth of 31% during its second quarter of 2025 and remains on track to eventually break even on streaming profitability. He added that the first-party-data collected during the Super Bowl would be “critically important” to its advertising partners and help drive Tubi’s future growth in cost per thousand impressions (CPMs).

“The Super Bowl will provide a good test on the viability of Fox dumping more of its live broadcasts onto Tubi,” eMarketer senior analyst Ross Benes told TheWrap. “Tubi will get a huge bump in consumer awareness from the Super Bowl even though most people will watch via linear.”

The free access to the Super Bowl comes as audiences are increasingly ditching linear TV in favor of streaming. As of June 30, 2024, Fox reported a total of 304 million cable subscribers across its News Media and Sports networks, down from 327 million during the same period in 2023, according to Nielsen data cited in its latest annual report. 

But while streaming has allowed sports leagues like the NFL to extend their reach with audiences, it has also made it more difficult than ever for sports fans to find their favorite programming all in one place. Depending on how many SVOD services you subscribe to, it can also be more expensive than linear, giving Tubi an opportunity to score a touchdown with cord cutters and cord nevers.

According to a Hub Entertainment Research survey of nearly 4,000 FAST users and nearly 2,300 non-FAST users, seven in 10 TV users now report using at least one FAST service. Of the respondents surveyed, 74% reported having three or more streaming subscriptions, 29% reported spending at least $100 per month on TV, 50% said they watch more than 20 hours of TV per week and 40% said they were under the age of 35. 

Around 77% of Tubi’s audience, which skews towards millennials and Gen Z, doesn’t have cable, its executives told TheWrap.   

“We feel like this is a really great moment to bring that cordless generation into the biggest moment in a way that gives them some choice and flexibility about how and where and when to watch,” Parlapiano said. 

More opportunities for advertisers

Last year’s Super Bowl became the most-watched telecast in CBS history and delivered a record-setting audience for Paramount+, averaging 123.7 million viewers across all platforms, including CBS, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, Univision, CBS Sports and NFL digital properties. 

The figure marked a 7% increase from the previous record of 115.1 million viewers when Fox hosted the Super Bowl in 2023. That year, Fox generated around $600 million in advertising revenue. This year, the media giant is on track to garner nearly $700 million. 

In November, Murdoch revealed that Super Bowl ad inventory was sold out at “record pricing,” with reports pegging the figure at over $7 million per commercial. But some of its upfront buyers have since had to bow out, allowing it to sell 10 of its 30-second spots for $8 million apiece, an individual familiar with the matter told TheWrap last week. 

In addition to in-game ads being more expensive, 30-second spots for Fox’s pre-game coverage have gone for as much as $4.5 million, compared to $2 million in the past, the individual said, while 30-second ads for post-game coverage might go for around $4 million, compared to $2.5 million to $3 million previously.

Tubi will air two of its own spots during the game, one of which is a promo for its new original series “The Z Suite,” starring Lauren Graham. 

It also unveiled a 10-second teaser for another spot, which features a woman getting an ultrasound and her doctor telling her: “It’s a boy, and it looks like he’s going to be in a big game commercial this year.”

“The tone of the spot is going to be our signature kind of wacky vibe. But this year, we are looking to land a deeper emotional connection with the brand,” Parlapiano said. “Its an interesting metaphor for our business, because no one understood what we were doing at the beginning. And now everybody is here with us in this ad-supported space, and all these other entertainment companies are taking notice, so it’s a really nice arc.”

Tubi also plans to host a live, pre-game red carpet with Olivia Culpo, which is designed to attract a younger, multicultural audience that’s interested in “the intersection of where sports meets culture,” chief content officer Adam Lewinson told TheWrap. 

“It’s going to be for the viewers who are really interested in seeing the fits that the athletes are wearing when they’re walking through the tunnel, they want to know who designed Taylor Swift’s outfit, all of these important questions,” he said. “We’ve got lots of special surprises coming, but it’s going to be celebrity interviews and conversations right at the heart of sports, culture and fashion. So definitely counter programming to Tom Brady and the telestrator and all the great things that they’ll be doing on the Fox Sports side.”

While Tubi and Fox Sport’s feeds will have the same ad loads, Parlapiano said Tubi’s pre-game programming would provide advertisers with additional sponsorship and brand integration opportunities.

“We have brands that were locked in before we announced having the Super Bowl, but obviously demand for red carpet went way up after this Super Bowl simulcast announcement came out,” Parlapiano said. “From an advertiser perception standpoint, this is just a huge proving ground for Tubi, and I think having the game go off successfully is huge for credibility and where we are in the streaming space. Just because we’re ad-supported doesn’t mean we can’t do all the things that all the big dogs do.”

A launch pad for original programming

While Tubi offers some smaller live sports, such as Liga MX matches and NBA G League, there are no plans to add premium sports to its content lineup. Instead, the executives are banking on Super Bowl LIX to serve as a launch pad for Tubi’s library of 275,000 movies and TV episodes and over 300 Tubi originals.

Lewinson said that over 90% of the platform’s viewership comes from its on-demand programming and that he has “every belief that it’s going to continue to be that way.” 

After the game ends, the service plans to re-air the premiere of The Z Suite.” Other programming that Tubi is looking to promote includes the talk show “We Got Time Today” with Deion Sanders and the original film “The Thicket” with Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis. 

“I think the real business objective is to help people find their own personal rabbit holes on Tubi after this,” Parlapiano said. “From our perspective, it’s not just about obviously producing a great event that is delightful and fast and seamless and frictionless, but making sure we can retain some of the viewership that comes from people that are net new.”

For the month of December, Tubi accounted for 1.7% of the streaming category’s total 43.3% viewership share among U.S. households, according to Nielsen, surpassing the shares of Peacock, Paramount+, Max, and its FAST competitor Pluto TV.

While SVOD and AVOD ultimately have two different goals — subscriber retention vs. user consumption — Lewinson argued the latter streaming category isn’t simply a supplement to the former.  

“Ultimately, we’re in an attention economy and the name of the game is having relevant content that viewers want to watch and forging that connection. We’re in competition with Tiktok, with Twitch, with other streamers, with linear. We’re in competition for eyeballs,” he said. “But we’ve always raced our own race, we’ve always stuck to our strategy, and in a time when people didn’t believe that free, ad-supported was going to be a key part of streaming, obviously, the pendulum has completely shifted. That’s our competitive position in the marketplace.”

Fox goes direct-to-consumer

Fox Sports’ Tubi’s takeover for the Super Bowl comes as Fox Corp. scrapped plans last month to launch Venu Sports, a proposed joint venture with Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, after the offering was temporarily blocked due to an antitrust lawsuit from Fubo.

That lawsuit was later settled, but the threat of additional lawsuits from pay TV operators like DirecTV and Dish Network played a role in the decision, an insider previously told TheWrap. 

Despite Venu’s death, Murdoch emphasized the importance of meeting audiences where they are – including cord cutters and cord nevers – and unveiled plans to launch a new streaming service by the end of 2025. The service will be a “lean and mean bundle” of its existing sports and news content and brands, he said, which would be “economically positive” for the company with a “relatively low” incremental cost compared to its peers.

“We have no intention of turning a traditional distribution customer into our DTC customer, so our subscriber expectations will be modest and we’re going to price the service accordingly,” he said, adding that the company is “pleased with the emerging bundle. We think it bodes well for the business going forward.”

In addition to Tubi, Super Bowl LIX is available to watch on Fox, the Fox Sports app, Fox Deportes, Telemundo and across NFL digital properties.

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