Tubi's contrarian tail-and-AI strategy

Hear ye, hear ye. Howard is back on Trends With Friends with an actual friend and streaming insider: Farhad Massoudi, founder of Tubi – the free, ad-supported streaming service he started in 2011, launched in 2014, and sold to Fox for about $500M. Today, Tubi has 100M+ MAUs, $1B+ in revenue, and is profitable… not bad for what everyone once dismissed as “crap tail content.” Farhad walks through how Tubi really worked:Why he bet on the tail of the library (bottom 99%) instead of the sexy top 20 originalsHow Tubi was always a data & AI company that happened to be mediaWhy fragmentation in news, music, and now TV makes the YouTube-style model inevitableThen they go deep on the Netflix–Warner Bros–Paramount–Ellison–Qatar circus:The AT&T → WarnerMedia → Discovery saga and how the bundling thesis already failed twiceWhy Netflix paying a ~180% premium for Warner is, in Farhad’s words, a huge mistakeThe harsh reality: most of Warner’s library is already licensed out (including to Tubi) for yearsWhy Netflix can’t just move the whole library onto its own service without nuking valuable dealsHow international licensing (like Sky in the UK) totally breaks the “just bring it all under Netflix” fantasyWhy the best they can really do is yet another bundle… over many yearsHoward and Farhad also hit: Why YouTube, not Disney/Paramount/Warner, is Netflix’s real competitionHoward’s own shift from “Netflix first” to YouTube first for nightly viewingWhy platforms + algorithms + data will always beat pure curation, except in tiny “Ferrari” nichesThe idea that AI will lower content costs, blow up creation, and make platforms the big winnersHow Ellison’s media buying spree might be a hedge against his massive AI bet (people with more free time need more entertainment)Why it was so hard to raise money for Tubi, why the Fox deal was the right home, and why Farhad still cares about his “baby”A detour into Bravo-ification of Netflix, sports docs, and whether they actually care if you’re watching or just payingPlus some extremely on-brand degeneracy: Persian carpets, 11-foot chest hairs, and showing up to a brutal Italian cycling trip having never clipped into a bikeIf you care about:Streaming wars (Netflix / Warner / Paramount / NBC / Tubi / YouTube)Platforms vs curationAI’s impact on mediaAnd how real operators see this space……this is a masterclass in how the next decade of media might actually play out.

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