Tubi, the Fox-owned free ad-supported streaming service, launched Mixtapes, a feature that lets users create and share curated watchlists from the platform's nearly 400,000 movies and TV episodes.
Users can build playlists manually or ask Tubi to suggest a starting point they can then edit. They can title and arrange watchlists in any order, then publish them publicly or keep them private. Viewing a Mixtape does not require a Tubi account, but creating one does.
Tubi's Mixtapes website already features playlists like "Millennial Memory Lane" with titles such as Cruel Intentions (1999), The Fifth Element (1997), Everybody Hates Chris, and Degrassi: The Next Generation, as well as "Bald Baddies" including Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) and Central Intelligence (2016).
The feature addresses a pain point in streaming. A Gracenote survey of 3,000 consumers across the US, Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, and the UK found that nearly 33 percent of streaming users feel content fragmentation negatively impacts their TV experience. Forty-nine percent said they would cancel a service due to difficulty finding content, and 19 percent said they would abandon a viewing session if their search fails.
For Tubi, an ad-supported platform, easier content discovery could boost user growth and watch time, which drives ad revenue. Mubi, Plex, and JustWatch offer similar sharable watchlist features, though Mubi's lists can include content unavailable on the platform. Human curation may appeal to users more than AI recommendations while keeping Tubi's costs lower than competitor approaches.