One night, I was thinking about but not watching the weird new “on-demand [free] streaming service” Tubi, and wondering what the fuck its deal was. So, I opened up Bing, the search engine that’s number two in every conceivable way, and therefore, I thought, just the figurative man for the job, and asked, “what the fuck is Tubi?"
Granted, I had watched some weird stuff on Tubi already (among other things, a Bigfoot documentary and a third-rate spaghetti western), which meant that I both knew what it was and had no clue at all what it was really about. Well, Tubi, it turns out, is an “‘on-demand [free] streaming service’” (owned by Fox, no less) that inserts ads into its weird 3rd-rate inventory of films and shows, and therein lies the rub.
As Josh Levinson and Daniel Martin write in the article cited above, “The only real downside is the content. Since Tubi only makes money from advertising, it has little money to spend on content, so it licenses more affordable older material” and, I must add, newer bad material as well. Not satisfied watching Matthew McConaughey in Mud on like nine other streaming platforms? Watch it for free (never mind your extant subscription costs elsewhere), with minimal commercial interruptions, on Tubi instead. Not sold? Well, guess how many Jean Claude Van Dame movies are currently available on Tubi. If you said 24*, one for every hour of the day, then you are right. Just think: what you could have rented for a dollar a piece from your neighborhood video store back in 1994 (provided that you could send such recent anti-hits as The Bouncer, Enemies Closer, and Swelter back in time to the very same year Timecop** was made) you can watch for precisely no dollars here. There are 19 Seagal titles***, more than 10 but less than 15 Chuck Norris movies****, and at least five of Andrew McCarthy’s second-best efforts warehoused in Tubi, but there is, sadly, nothing featuring Jim J. Bullock.
Given that their business model is showcasing acre after acre of ad-hacked Saturday afternoon cable horseshit of yore, Tubi offers an extensive drop-down menu to facilitate browsing. To narrow things down a bit, you can wade through the murk of “Recently Added” content, which offers more than 500***** new titles to choose from, including Air Force One, Striptease, The Girls of Rio, North Korea Vs. USA: A Game of Nuclear Chicken, Liberace’s Easter Special, and Sasquatch Abounds, all before you even get close to the end of the list. Okay, then. Maybe the “Most Popular” and “Featured” labels will help propel you toward a movie that’s right for you. How about Marlon Wayans in Little Man? Or half the famous people from the 90s in the legal snore A Time to Kill? Or maybe Kevin Costner in The Postman, his 1997 post-apocalyptic answer to the question: “What if Waterworld but on land?"
There is good stuff on Tubi, like Oliver Stone’s JFK, a bunch of Werner Herzog flicks, and a few undisputed classics by the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Guest. But watching A Mighty Wind on this dismal website, on your whirring computer, is an act of subtle but powerful denigration, like looking up a childhood friend on Bing. It takes what you used to value (“Oh, Eyes Wide Shut”) and gives it that non-magical Wal-Mart bargain-bin feel. The proximity of Seven Pounds and Dark Crimes makes you****** want to read a book instead.
But despite its (albeit fascinating) mediocrity, Tubi is a valuable heuristic for analyzing the contemporary stream-scape. It’s basically Netflix without the vertically integrated reverse-engineered gimcrack like The Midnight Sky and Extraction or those two shows you don’t like very much but binge watch nonetheless. I know Netflix’s subscription bill is trending up, but Tubi asks, “What if you paid nothing and could watch 55% of this junk anyway?"
Like Farley Mowat’s experiment in Never Cry Wolf*******, where he ate “only mice for protein sustenance” to show that wolves could survive on small game and weren’t, as was speculated at the time, decimating northern Canadian “caribou population[s],” someone, not me, should perform a like experiment with Tubi, watching it and nothing else for maybe a month or so. Is this kind of passive, almost anything will do approach to streaming sustainable?
Of course, for millions of Americans driven by immiseration to the margins of digital consumption, the answer is necessarily yes. But the broader pitch is unmistakably sober, if deflating: Tubi probably doesn’t have what you want, but maybe it has (just barely) enough to get by.
__________
*as of this writing.
**Time Cop is currently available on Tubi.
***Though a couple of these are Spanish-language redundancies.
****The number is a little hard to pin down without watching a handful of ambiguous returns. For example, it’s hard to tell why a “Chuck Norris” search retrieves titles like the 1959 B-movie horror Teenage Zombies but it does.
*****I stopped counting at 500.
******Well, me.
*******In the film, at least. I read but cannot remember if he actually does this in the book.