Tubi’s chief content officer, Adam Lewinson, isn’t sweating competition in the ad-supported video space, not even from powerhouses like Amazon and Roku. In fact, he said Wednesday that Roku’s entrance into the ad space has helped Tubi.
“What I think The Roku Channel has done is they’ve validated the space and they’ve helped educate [consumers] through some of the Roku boxes,” Lewinson said during a panel on streaming at The Grill, TheWrap’s annual business and entertainment conference, joined by Awesomeness co-head Shelley Zimmerman and Conde Nast Entertainment SVP of production Bruce Perlmutter.
Lewinson that Roku’s move into ad-supported streaming has helped educate consumers about the medium — “and we get them over to Tubi and they don’t leave,” he added.
Launched in 2014, Tubi has a library of more than 12,000 movies and television shows and roughly 40,000 hours of content. At the start of the year, the company reported a 180% year jump in ad revenue for 2018 and a 400% increase in the amount of content watched on the platform. (It didn’t disclose specifics).
Watch the full video of the panel above.