Not that they didn’t have it already, but News Corp Australia finally has “access to the big screen in the lounge room”. Forget Sky News – which pops up on my (regional) screen – and forget, if you can, the hash Murdoch junior made of an earlier ploy to take control of Ten.
Here’s an “exclusive new partnership” with Tubi, an ad-supported streaming service within Fox Corporation… which in Australia, News effectively had all the time, albeit within the counter-interests of Foxtel.
With the unloading of that to British sports streaming giant DAZN for a useful A$3.4 billion, News (and then partner Telstra, for that matter) are free to exploit Tubi’s potential.
Making today’s D_Coded event, the ideal opportunity for NCA executive chairman Michael Miller to strut “the next step in (its) evolving video strategy” as News expands its footprint in the growing connected TV space.
Unlike Foxtel, Tubi is free. And despite the fact that we’ve seen little of it in Australia, it’s big: Tubi claims more than 97 million active monthly users streaming more than ten billion hours of content during 2024, plus “the world’s largest collection of premium on-demand content catalogues”. In the US, Tubi is bigger than Peacock, Paramount+ and Max.
There’s a downside, of course. But only if you’re a viewer: With News’ updated first party data tool Intent Connect, it now offers “targetted ads that are full screen, unskippable, with sound on”.
But rival YouTube is getting harder to skip, and nothing is for nothing.
News’ head of client partnerships Lou Barrett (pictured) describes it as “the made-for-ads streaming service”. For advertisers, it’s being aggressively priced at $15cpm, at least if you’ve got $20,000 to spend this financial year.
Forgetting the ad dollars for a moment, it remains to be seen whether News will be able to resist the opportunity to leverage Tubi’s audience to extend Sky News’ politically-skewed message nationally.
As a free ad-supported channel, Tubi occupies the same space as 7+, 9Now and TenPlay plus, globally, Paramount’s Pluto TV. A critical difference may be the power of News’ cross-promotion… including all those house ads in its print publications.
Watch this space.
• News also announced new data capabilities to make Intent Connect faster, highly intuitive and “more impactful”, promising to “take the guesswork out of planning, booking and measuring a campaign”. During the year, the tool will get the AI segment builder chatbot, a new recommendation engine: This brand new tool enhances campaign reach by identifying and suggesting ad an upgraded Content Connect feature, and a ‘campaign and attribution summary’ analysis tool.The D_Coded road show continues to Melbourne this week and Brisbane next.
Peter Coleman