David Salmon on Tubi’s International Journey

David Salmon, executive VP and managing director for international at Tubi, discussed the AVOD service’s recent U.K. launch at the FAST Festival.

On what’s driven Tubi’s success in North America, Salmon referenced the lack of barriers to users, ubiquitous reach, an extensive content slate and responding to audience feedback. You can see Salmon’s keynote conversation with World Screen’s Anna Carugati here.

“We offer an extremely large, broad, culturally ambitious content offering,” Salmon said. “It allows our consumers to discover amazing, sometimes weird, wonderful new pieces of content. Fandoms have overperformed our expectations for customers to attach themselves to Tubi as a brand.”

The AVOD platform recently went live in the U.K., a crowded media market, Salmon noted. “You have that combination of local BVOD players—the traditional broadcasters with these great digital services—and the big global SVOD brands. We believe that we can follow a similar playbook to the one we’ve been very successful with in North America. There is a tendency, with both BVOD and SVOD platforms, to be quite clustered around a monoculture. They’re focused on super-serving the median viewer because the way they either license their content or think about monetizing is focused on trying to have one piece of content be watched by as many people as possible. That creates a lot of concentration for demos in the middle. But it means you have these interesting, diverse demos that get underserved by any of those platforms. We’ve entered the market with a broad catalog. We’ve got 20,000 titles as a starting point. It’s already one of the largest catalog libraries in the market. Of that 20,000, there are about 4,500 movies, which is ten times what you typically find on the standard BVOD services. We’re hoping to provide amazing content discovery and a real breadth. That’s everything from brilliant blue-chip Hollywood films to amazing, premium Bollywood content; some of the best, most exciting cinema coming out of Lagos; [and] a great arthouse collection. We’re going broad; we’re going deep. We want to offer choice to consumers.”

The U.K. joins an international footprint at Tubi that already includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and certain Latin American markets. “In every market we’ve entered, we’ve started with a big content catalog, but we’ve continued to lean into wanting to understand the data. What’s working? What are we underperforming in? Where do we need to lean in? We make sure that instead of treating every market like a monolithic bloc of consumers, we understand that the interests and fandoms will vary. Therefore, we want to ensure that we feel extremely attuned to what’s happening on our platform and by following social channels.”

Addressing issues with content discovery, Salmon explained that Tubi has invested in personalization and recommendation tools since its inception. “We have a large machine learning team that is extremely focused on building content discovery algorithms that allow people not to feel like they’re endlessly scrolling, but instead, they’re spontaneously discovering these great moments of content. The idea is that as we increase the size of our library, we can offer better content discovery because the more data we build, the more effective the personalization becomes for every single consumer.”

Amid a global slowdown in ad spend, Salmon referenced Tubi’s ability to “over-deliver value and find traction with advertisers” by delivering “incremental audiences that they’re not able to access through traditional, linear or any of the cluster BVOD services. Those services are amazing for buying mass simultaneous reach of a particular demo. However, for example, in the U.S., 65 percent of Tubi’s audience base are cord-cutters or cord-nevers. If you’re a large brand and you want to get in front of certain types of consumers, Tubi becomes an amazing solution for finding audiences you can’t find anywhere else. We skew a bit younger and a lot more diverse. These are audiences that FAST and AVOD, but Tubi more specifically, have been able to help advertisers reach.”