The choice that it takes away is the best part of FAST TV

The Appeal of Free TV Streaming: How Tuning Apps Drives TV Discovery and Growth. An Empirical Study by Tubi

Big hits can drive brand loyalty. If viewers want to see what new shows are coming up, they will just sit down and open the streaming services likeNetflix orHbo. All the free services are interchangeable, just as they are with the size of their library and the title you’re looking for. There are hundreds of FAST channels available, many of them accessible from multiple platforms. The free streamers have lots of users but not as many fans.

There are a number of wonderful ways that free streamers work. Since these platforms have a lot of incentive to get you watching something as soon as possible, they do away with most of the design quirks you see in most streaming apps. You don’t have to log in because you can scroll past all the big banners showing new shows that do not interest you. You just hit play. When you load the app, it automatically starts playing a channel you were watching last, which is truly delightful. You turn the TV on, and something is already playing.

There is a lot of channel surfing involved in the future of TV. It’s almost like the TV business of old. That is actually a part of the point.

The appeal of free streaming is right there in the name: it’s free! Forty-four percent of people canceled at least one paid service in the last six months because they were spending too much on streaming, and more than three quarters of them said they already spent more than they wanted on their services. Deloitte also found that 59 percent of users were happy to watch a few ads an hour in exchange for a cheaper, or even free, subscription.

The services are starting to use ads as well. Netflix has already discovered that it makes more money per user on its ad-supported plan — $6.99 a month with a few ads an hour — than it does from pure subscriptions. Disney Plus has an ad-supported plan now, too. The Max service, as well as the rest of the industry, do. Ads are the future of the entire streaming market, it appears.

“Number one job for me is engagement,” says Adam Lewinson, the chief content officer at Tubi. “Since we are ad-supported, we don’t have a dual revenue stream. We don’t take credit cards, we never will — we make money when viewers are consuming content.” Scott Reich, the SVP of content at Pluto TV, says the same. I don’t have to pay anything if I don’t like it. It is our job to give you a reason to come back.

Personalization is very important to these platforms. They won’t care what you watch if they can hook you on 11 million episodes of Project Runway and send you down an infinite Gordon Ramsay rabbit hole. Lewinson says it is a way for people who aren’t looking for the same kind of shows to watch it. To get the right piece of content to the right viewer and to learn about what they are interested in is part of our job. He doesn’t have to reach the entire audience but he does have to convince people to keep watching.

Reich says big-name shows and films tend to bring people in, but that is not the reason they stay. “What drives a lot of our viewing time are the single series or the franchise channels,” he says. CSI, Three’s Company and The Star Treks of the world. That causes a lot of viewing time. And what people come back for is a lot of the classic TV and a little more of the niche channels — your food, your home, your lifestyle channels.”

There are not every free streamers who chase hits. Reich says that it’s owned by Paramount Plus and is doing enough hit-hunting of its own. “We have a gazillion studios and a gazillion channels that make original programming every single day,” he says. “And because we are able to tap into that, we can figure out how we play off each other — how you can catch up on Pluto and we then throw back to Paramount Plus, or one of the linear networks.”

There’s a flip side to that strategy, though: free streaming services aren’t exactly generating huge hits. Sure, spending a fortune on Succession just to have a couple million people tweet about it every week may not be a good business on its own, but it brings huge cachet and brand awareness to HBO, which brings more creators with more good ideas, which brings a few more subscribers… follow it out long enough, and there’s a real business there.

But for Tubi, which is Fox Entertainment’s flagship streaming service, the hits might be coming. Lewinson says that five years ago his buying power was less than it is today. He rattles off some of Tubi’s recent originals: The Stepmother, about a killer mom; Dead Hot, starring Vanessa Hudgens; and a documentary series from Vice, which just launched with an episode about Elon Musk. Is there anything Oscar or Emmy related in there? Probably not. But Lewinson says it’s a definite leap up in ambition for the service, and there’s more to come.

The first cultural moment of Freevee seems to be already taking shape. It’s a show called Jury Duty, a mockumentary-style show about a court case in which everyone but the main character knows the whole thing is fake. The show became a hit, and a TikTok sensation, and sparked a huge amount of discussion online — plus a lot of “what in the world is Freevee and how do I watch it” stories. “Almost [every] studio and network passed,” producer Lee Eisenberg told The Daily Beast. It seemed like the only place which stepped up was Freevee.

I’ve been watching TV on demand for over 20 years. I picked up the entire run of The Sopranos from the college library before streaming. When I graduated, I kept the habit, preferring to watch things from DVD box sets rather than just zoning out in front of the television. I am the one who always has a show that people want to watch on a streaming service or network instead of the show that they love on a cable channel. But lately, I’ve been using Pluto TV, and I’ve found myself realizing just how relaxing it is to just let go.

I was able to watch three out of order episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and did not feel any anxiety. I didn’t need to make sure I didn’t miss a scene or episode, I just needed to watch it again. The stakes were lower, and I was fine leaving it on while I vacuumed up more dog hair than I thought my dog was capable of shedding.

And unlike more social media-driven stuff such as TikTok and YouTube — which also shove free content in your face for the low, low price of your attention on occasional ads — I wasn’t having to babysit Pluto. I don’t need to pick the next thing or make a big deal out of it. I didn’t need to look up on my phone to see the next show. I could just listen to the news on my TV and do nothing else.