Free Streaming Service Tubi Expands to Australia

Janko Roettgers

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Ad-supported streaming service Tubi is coming to Australia: The free video service will go live down under on September 1, and feature a catalog of close to 7000 movies and TV show episodes.

Some of the movies available at launch will include “3:10 to Yuma,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “Kickboxer” and “Stranger Than Fiction.” In the coming 6 months, Tubi plans to add “Dirty Dancing,” “The Grudge,” “Requiem for a Dream,” “Reservoir Dogs,” “Saw,” “Traffic” and “Young Guns.”

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Tubi first launched in the U.S. in 2014, and expanded to Canada the year after. CEO Farhad Massoudi told Variety this week that the company was looking to expand into additional markets in the next year, but declined to comment on specifics. “We have pretty ambitious goals for our international expansion,” he said. “This is a big investment for us.”

Part of what made Australia attractive to Tubi was its established digital media market. The country is thought to be one of Netflix’s largest markets outside of the U.S., and local ISP Telstra is using white-labeled Roku devices to bring streaming to its customers. “It’s a pretty mature video advertising market,” Massoudi added.

Tubi has seen a lot of success in the U.S. in recent months, where it has been able to grow its catalog to 15,000 titles. The company said earlier this summer that it surpassed 20 million users in May, who collectively watched more than 94 million hours of programming on its service that month.

“We’ve seen AVOD do very well in the U.S.,” Massoudi said. “Now, we want to take that beyond U.S. borders.”

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