Tubi CEO Anjali Sud says there’s a reason why the FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) channel business is booming.
“People want great storytelling, but they don’t want to pay, because they’re otherwise being entertained by TikTok,” Sud told the Banff World Media Festival on Monday during a keynote address. Sud in Sept. 2023 took the helm at Fox’s free, ad-supported streamer after taking over from Tubi founder Farhad Massoudi.
During her reign, Tubi has enjoyed a growth spurt. Tubi in January 2025 reported it had surpassed 97 million monthly active users. That’s a jump from more than 78 million MAUs posted in mid-2024. The streaming platform, which launched in 2014, also said it streamed over 10 billion streaming hours in the 2024 calendar year.
On the originals front, Sud was clear she and other Tubi programmers aren’t overly obsessed about being taste makers. That’s the job of audiences. “We’re pretty flexible in terms of what is going to be good. We don’t start with a philosophical point of view. We listen to what audiences want and give them more of that,” Sub told the Banff festival.
The Tubi chief is also bullish about artificial intelligence, initially by allowing consumers to more easily discover content to view and be engaged by. Looking to the future, Sud added AI can eventually reduce the cost of storytelling. “The biggest potential is to accelerate creativity by making it easier, faster and cheaper to generate (content), if utilized well,” Sud said.
She also touted YouTube as a big challenger to Netflix in the streaming space. “The reason they (YouTube) are an important model to look at is their cost to produce is zero, and they have a flywheel and the scale to just go faster and faster,” Sud said.
Sud said Tubi, with its “disrupter mentality,” as in streaming Super Bowl LIX (“That was risky for us”), had ambitions to also draw indie filmmakers who have self-funded projects and may look to Tubi to get their content on TV.
“We will be able to raise the bar on quality, while enabling more people to participate,” she added about working with digital-native creators. Here Tubi recently launched “Stubios,” a program for creatives, or “Stubiorunners,” who will want more creative control, while using her platform get to Hollywood and ad-supported TV.
Sud said the new program wasn’t about placing user-generated content on Tubi, as does YouTube. Instead, Tubi will look to content creators who already have a big audience online and get them into the TV space.
“This is an area that hasn’t been cracked, which is how do you help long-tail creators who are either already making long form content and how do you help them,” Sud argued.
