1. Tubi Goes Beast Mode
While Netflix and others are making noise and “taking meetings” about bringing YouTubers into the mix, Tubi actually went out and did something about it, bringing top YouTube star MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) onboard along with other top acts like Jomboy Media (sports content) and Alan’s Universe (high school melodramas.)
The company is also bringing TikTok’s Global Head of Creator Marketing, Kudzi Chikumbu, in a senior role to further boost that part of their business.
Why It Matters
Unlike many of its peers, Tubi has staked out a very clear market position beyond “free.”
They’ve leaned in heavily to reaching a younger, more female and more diverse demo, picking up first run shows from the UK and other markets like Big Mood, and going all-in on on-demand rather than launching hundreds of linear channels.
Which is why Creator content will not feel that out of place on the service.
Or at least most of it.
MrBeast has 421 million subscribers to his YouTube channel and has long surpassed PewDiePie for the title of “Guy People Who Don’t Watch YouTube Creators Name Check When They Want To Name Check A YouTube Creator.”
So if nothing else, there’s the curiosity factor and Tubi will get a lot of older eyeballs as a result.
But that is not what is so important about the MrBeast deal.
What is important is that it is essentially an old school syndication deal.
Tubi is getting Seasons 4 through 6 of MrBeast’s YouTube series.
Sort of how Netflix got older seasons of Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead back in the day.
Or your local broadcast station got reruns of The Brady Bunch much further back in the day.
This is the first deal of this kind that Donaldson/Beast has struck. He has a deal for a series on Amazon, but that is a new show, created expressly for Amazon. He has a pre-existing deal with Tubi for something called MrBeast Live, but that’s not a syndication play.
If this works the way I presume both parties intend, it will allow Tubi to cement its relationship with Zoomers and Alphas while driving new viewers to BeastWorld, a win for both parties.
Jomboy, one of the other big names Tubi scored, is sports content, and two baseball-themed shows, Talkin Baseball and Talkin Yanks will appear on the service. The shows are irreverent and podcasty, but nothing the full spectrum of baseball fans would not enjoy—they are very much within the range of “normal” for newer sports-related content—and thus will help Tubi bring in more male viewers and open the door for a whole world of Bro Content from the podcasting and podcasting adjacent universe.
So that’s the Stuff You’ve Seen Before segment.
And now, to quote Rocket J. Squirrel, for something completely different: Alan’s Universe. (No relation.)
The series, created by Alan Chikin Chow, is billed (by Gemini) as “a high school-based anthology series exploring themes of love, friendship, and overcoming challenges, with Alan and his classmates facing bullies and villains.”
Which is likely how I would describe it if I were a GPT, with Chat helpfully adding that the shows are “intentionally stylized to look like a ‘Netflix-style’ or ‘Disney Channel‑style’ teen drama.”
The actual result is something far, far, far more completely out there.
I will beseech you to watch the first minute or so of this typical episode for yourself as words simply cannot do it justice.
But if you’re someplace where viewing is impossible, think Rocky Horror Picture Show without the knowing wink that this is all just camp.
There is a straight line from Alan’s Universe to the ReelShort series I described two weeks ago. They’re unrecognizable to Western audiences in that they make Disney Channel shows like The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and Wizards of Waverly Place look like Masterpiece Theater.
But they are not aimed at us.
They are aimed at overseas audiences in Asia and the Global South who have not grown up on American and European television and often do not speak any English.
With an equally sizable secondary audience of pre-teens and tweens who don’t mind the broadness and are too young to understand camp, but who very much like watching shows about “teenagers.”
In other words, the same demo as The Disney Channel.
The benefit for Tubi is that Alan’s Universe will bring in all those hip eight- and nine-year-olds, creating what Tubi hopes is lifelong loyalty.
The episode above does have 15 million views on YouTube, so even if they just pick up 10 percent of that, it’s a win.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are one of the other FAST services, you need to learn from Tubi.
Granted there is a big difference in how apps like Tubi and Pluto need to operate and the way apps like Samsung TV Plus and LG Channels do.
The latter are the first thing you see when you turn on the TV, front and center, no action necessary.
Whereas the former need you to take a huge extra step and actively decide to click on their icon instead of Netflix or Hulu or HBO Max.
So having an identity and being a destination for shows you can’t find elsewhere is going to be a huge driver in getting people to take that extra step. Or, as in the case of OEM-owned FASTs, not taking that extra step.
There are plenty of other popular creators out there and I doubt any of them would be averse to some sort of syndication play.
So get on it.
If you’re Tubi, take a bow. Yet again you’ve managed to skate where the puck is heading rather than trying to chase it.
Well done.
2. Clipping Is The Latest Promo Trend
I’ve known for a while now that “clipping”—creating short, social-media ready clips—has become a huge trend in the way TV series (and most everything else) is promoted.
What I did not know, until I read about it in The Wall Street Journal this morning, is that there is a whole cottage industry of 22 year-old “clippers” who can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing things that a host of AI apps can already do.
Only, one would hope, quite a bit better and with far greater personalization.
Why It Matters
There are two key factors to a successful “clip” campaign: repetition and outrage.
Repetition as in creating as many different clips as possible so that the intended audience can’t avoid seeing them.
Outrage as in “OMG! What is this! I need to stop and react to it. Heart or fire?”
Text is often used to create said outrage.
To use an example from the aforementioned article, a clip of a reality TV star getting into a Lamborghini might have a caption that read “No way this person just bought the most expensive car in the world!” while the clip would reveal that they had, in fact, just bought that car.
Buzzfeed lives.
The television industry has picked up on this trend as a great way to promote shows.
To wit, a 22 year-old clipmeister created a campaign for the FX/Hulu sitcom Adults that scored 12 million views on Insta and TikTok, two places where the audience for a show whose elevator pitch was likely “Friends! Only with Zoomers!” is most easily found.
What You Need To Do About It
This is a TikTok/Instagram thing as repetition on those platforms leads to virality. So the more reactions a clip gets, the more likely it is to go viral. Meaning you don’t need to post from an account with ten million followers to get traction.
So if you’re not already doing it, start.
Clipping is part of a broader shift to short-form-everything as attention spans shrink, especially for younger audiences.
Whether that shift is a short-term trend or a full-on sea change is still TBD, so embrace it now, but keep your eyes on where it’s heading.
There are plenty of AI tools that create clips, but if you’re a great big streaming service with a great big budget, you may want to hire an actual human, at least your first time out.
Virality, or creating virality, is still something of a skill, though I may still have PTSD from long-ago ad agency briefs that instructed the creative team to “create a viral video” and having to explain that one could not actually ensure that something would go viral.
At least not back in 2002.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.