“It was a game that everyone played,” says Parlapiano, “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 earn their content. The goal, at least the way Massoudi first envisaged, was to build backend infrastructure for studios to have their own streammate.

But Massoudi realized that scaling down the version of his business, at the time, would be too difficult. So he turned to a composite white label product through licensing offers. Netflix was working on the success of House of Cards and Orange is the new blackBreakout Originals that set a new measure for streamers. Massoudi felt that licensing could be Tubi’s bread and butter. He wanted it to be the company’s first real pure game as a streaming service in the market, with a specific focus on lower cost content to keep profits healthy. And for eight years it was the model.

At the end of 2022, when the era of Peak TV came and went, Massoudi was plagued by questions about expansion. What was Tubi standing for? Where can it carve a unique path forward to compete in a crowded ecosystem that now includes both major players – Apple TV+, Amazon, Hulu – and dozens of niche streams such as Shilder and Zeus. The streaming wars would soon be over; How would Tubi put himself in the era?

Similar to YouTube, Tubi has adopted a creator -friendly model. From a content producer’s point of view, it was ‘very accommodating’, says J. Christopher Hamilton, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Syracuse who previously worked as entertainment manager at Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery. It was black viewers, says Hamilton, who introduced Tubi to a larger viewer during his herbrand. “This is largely the reason Tubi could collect some momentum compared to some of its competitors.”

As the company tried to reset, he realized that it could use the water cooler moments that happened online. In 2023, several grainy, poor shot films found passionate audiences on Tiktok and X. The films-with mockery of titles such as Amityville in the bonnet and Cocaine Cougar—Went viral on social media thanks to a group of creations, many of which were of the Detroit area. All the projects were funded themselves. “Tubi is not just a streaming service for fans to enjoy,” the journalist Phil Lewis wrote about the trend, “it has become an outlet for independent black filmmakers to showcase their art.”

And just like that, all eyes were on Tubi.

In the 1990s, Fox had a similar increase to prominence in programming. “When Fox began, it started with the spread of black-targeted content that was full in the community,” Hamilton adds. Tubi was purchased by Fox for $ 440 million in 2020, and by June 2023 Massoudi left the company. ‘A lot of the success of the network happened on the heels of black programming and black audiences. After being at some level of success, they turned to more good-heeled demographics, which were white men. The playbook is very much the same now. “