Fox Rolls The Dice With Tubi’s Free, 4K Super Bowl Streams

It sounds like a fantastic idea for fans of the biggest show on U.S. television, the NFL’s Super Bowl.

Fox, whose turn it is to broadcast the game this Sunday, announced a few weeks ago it would also stream the Super Bowl on Tubi, its free, ad-supported streaming service available on pretty much any device capable of catching online video.

The decision makes some sense. Fox has a small subscription streaming service tied to Fox News Channel, but nothing else. Meanwhile, Tubi has been growing like gangbusters, topping 97 million monthly active users, and streaming more than 10 billion hours of linear and on-demand programming in 2024.

Even better, Fox will stream the game on Tubi at 4K resolution, far better than the 1080i or 720p resolutions typically used for broadcast transmission to reach the widest audience.

The latest digital broadcasting standard, ATSC 3.0, enables 4K broadcasts, which almost certainly will be employed where available for the Super Bowl. But to provide that high-quality video, a station must have converted its broadcast operation to the so-called Next-Gen TV standard, a process that’s been progressing at snail speed across the country. Which means that in many smaller markets, the best way to get the highest-quality stream of the game will be through Tubi.

That’s still so far, so great for the NFL’s many millions of fans, who likely will be lined up by the tens of millions to watch two of the NFL’s best teams, the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, fight it out.

The game should attract plenty of interest. The Chiefs are going for a record third-straight Super Bowl win, trying to stake a claim to posterity for coach Andy Reid, quarterback Patrick Mahomes, and First Boyfriend/Hall of Fame-bound tight end Travis Kelce. Philadelphia, which lost to Kansas City two Super Bowls ago, is looking for revenge, riding the extraordinary talent of newly signed running back Saquon Barkley.

Beyond all that, advertisers should be stoked too, because their products and ads will look better than ever. After all, the game is their Super Bowl too.

All true, except….

Remember that made-for-Netflix “boxing” match in November between aging former world champ Mike Tyson and pugilistic influencer Jake Paul? It drew what Newsweek called a “ridiculous” amount of viewers, some 108 million globally, including 60 million or so in the United States, according to Netflix.

It was the biggest live streaming event ever, easily outstripping last year’s Peacock-only ‘cast of a first-round NFL playoff game.

But Netflix’s crush of viewers had a downside too. It overwhelmed even Netflix’s vaunted content-delivery networks, developed over the past couple of decades, causing what were charitably (or euphemistically) called “glitchy” feeds to some. To some of the industry experts who joined me today on a Future of TV.Live online panel, the resulting viewer experience was barely short of a disaster.

“(Netflix) underplayed it,” said Jeff Gilbert of consultancy XStep Inc., and a former executive with the streaming operations of Disney and Verizon. “’Glitchy’ is not the right word. It was unwatchable.”

That piled a lot of risk atop Netflix’s reputation going into its next live event, the Christmas Day games, but the company seemed to have gotten through unscathed. Tubi now faces an even bigger, higher-profile challenge.

“I have a lot of concerns about Tubi,” said Colin Dixon, chief analyst with nScreen Media, which tracks the video business. “I feel like they might have bitten off a little more than they can chew.”

Tubi’s problem, seemingly a good problem to have, is that its stream might be too successful, just as with the Tyson-Paul fight for Netflix, Dixon said.

“I have a feeling Tubi might attract a lot more people than they’re expecting,” Dixon said. “I know Lachlan (Murdoch, Fox Corp. CEO and chairman) feels this could be a bonanza for Tubi. It could be the exact opposite.”

Dixon and other panelists also acknowledged that no one at Netflix seemed to suffer any consequences from all the fight-night glitches. Perhaps that was because Netflix handled the concurrent flood of viewers for its Christmas Day NFL games.

Maybe Netflix learned the lessons it needed from the Tyson-Paul match’s extreme network stress test. But Gilbert suggested Netflix also may have benefitted from the relatively bad games, which probably kept viewer loads at a reasonable level.

Meanwhile, going free on streaming, as Tubi will do, represents a gamble, because it could attract a far larger audience without even the crowd-mitigating factor of a required subscription.

Paramount Global carried the Super Bowl last year on both CBS and its Paramount Plus subscription streaming service, drawing about 8 million viewers on the latter amid some glitchiness in the game’s third period, Gilbert said.

Comcast-owned Peacock’s streaming-only playoff game in January last year went off without notable hitches. It drew 27.6 million viewers across the streaming service, the home broadcast stations of the two teams involved, and the mobile app NFL+.

Those are far smaller numbers than the Tyson-Paul fight, but given the fight’s technical problems, Gilbert said he doubted 60 million unique households actually tuned in. Instead, he suggested, lots of people tried to watch one way, perhaps through their connected TV, before trying another option (or in his case, two) such as their mobile phone. If those tactics were widespread, it would cut the total actual viewership significantly, perhaps by half, to 30 million.

Now comes the Super Bowl, the game that year after year is the most-watched show on American television.

“This being (free-to-watch) Tubi, where does that (viewership total) go,” Gilbert asked. Without the barrier of a subscription signup, which moderately limited tune-in to the Peacock game and this winter’s Netflix events, Tubi could easily draw 12.5 million concurrent viewers or more.

Those numbers aren’t overwhelming, potentially. But Tubi is also streaming the game at 4K, resolution, which means “a significant increase in the bits involved” in delivering the game, Gilbert said. More bits means more stress on distribution networks.

Another consideration: “inside football, it’s about latency, bragging rights about who can put on the lowest latency,” which basically is the difference between the game’s unfolding in real time versus how fast it can be relayed from that stadium to a viewer’s house. Less latency is better. But backed-up networks could push latency levels as high as a minute or two behind what’s on the field.

Among those who might care a lot about such a delay are gamblers, a lucrative constituency for the league, the network and their advertisers. Zero latency would be particularly important for all the gamblers trying to participate in the zillions of “prop” bets that pop up during the Super Bowl. For gamblers, if there’s a big delta between what’s happening on the field and what they’re seeing on the screen, that’s a big problem.

“It’s a huge risk factor,” Gilbert said. “I think there’s going to be some trouble.”

“Trouble” is not likely to manifest with the two giants of the cable business, Charter Spectrum and Comcast, whose networks should be sturdy enough to handle even a crush of viewers, he said.

“Then there are 1,500 small guys that may not be able to handle it,” Gilbert said. “I think some of the small (internet service providers) are going to choke a little bit. If there is, there’s going to be some impact at Fox.”