Fox's (FOXA) Tubi Inks 30 Films Streaming Deal With Lionsgate

Fox Corporation’s FOXA free ad-supported streaming service, Tubi, recently announced the inking of a multi-year deal with Lionsgate (LGF.A) to exclusively house 30 new upcoming feature films. Per the agreement, Tubi will also add more than 200 Lionsgate library titles to the free service.

As part of the deal, Shattered, starring John Malkovich, Frank Grillo, Cameron Monaghan and Lily Krug, is now available on Tubi. The movie Pursuit is coming to the service on Jun 27 followed by Wolf Hound, featuring Trevor Donavan, James Maslow and Michael Waney Foster, which will release later this year.

Additionally, Lionsgate will bring more soon-to-be-announced, star-studded films to Tubi, featuring Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, Anna Paquin, Martin Lawrence, and more. The agreement covers films that are not part of Lionsgate’s pay-1 theatrical output deal with Starz.

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Tubi Amplifies Fox’s Ad Sales and Viewership

Fox acquired Tubi for around $440 million. The ad-supported streaming service is expected to bring in around $700 million in revenues by the end of 2022. In third-quarter fiscal 2022, this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company’s advertising (37.8% of revenues) increased 9.1% to $1.3 billion. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Tubi revealed that it had 51 million monthly active users as of the primary quarter, up from 33 million in the same period of 2021 and 25 million in 2020. The number of total hours of viewing was 3.6 billion in 2021.

The Lionsgate deal will expand new feature film content on the AVOD service. In addition to movies and television shows, Tubi offers a handful of linear news, weather and sports channels, including LiveNOW from Fox, ABC News Live, Newsy, Bloomberg Quicktake, Fox Weather, WeatherNation and live feeds from TEGNA, Hearst Television and Fox-owned broadcast stations.

Tubi recently announced that it will make every game of the 2022 FIFA World Cup available on-demand to bring sports content to viewers.

Tubi is also expanding its linear offerings in the burgeoning category of free, ad-supported television or FAST. Joining the existing lineup of more than 100 24-7 channels are showcases for The Masked Singer, TMZ and Studio Ramsay Global’s Gordon Ramsay, along with Tubi Originals and Tubi en Español.

The streaming deal announcement follows the news last week that Tubi is working with Nielsen NLSN on expanding measurement across its entire footprint of more than 25 devices. Tubi and Nielsen have rolled out initiatives for advertisers, including an analysis called Campaign Insights, which looks at unique content groupings, and Content Clusters, offering advertisers deeper audience information with the goal of providing a fuller context for brand messages.

While free, ad-supported streaming has gained immense popularity, it has been on a steep upward trajectory in terms of advertising revenues and viewership. Per a Rethink Research report, the market for AVOD services will reach $91 billion in advertising revenues by 2027.

This projection indicates sturdy growth prospects not only for Fox but also for the likes of Comcast and Paramount Global PARA owing to their acquisitions of Xumo and PlutoTV, respectively. Notably, Xumo, an advertising-supported free streaming service pulls streams from partners like ABC News, Fox Sports and USA Today and comes pre-installed on smart televisions.

In first-quarter 2022, Paramount owned Pluto TV’s global monthly active users (MAUs) increased to nearly 68 million. Pluto TV gained broad distribution on T-Mobile through T-Mobile Tuesdays, giving customers exclusive access to new content and original series.

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