By Belle Lin

Tubi, the ad-supported streaming service, is putting AI at the center of its strategy to take on bigger players and keep Gen Z viewers hooked.

The free streamer this week announced that its app is integrated into OpenAI's ChatGPT, letting viewers search for what to watch inside the chatbot.

"Our bet is that the future of television should be as easy and personalized as Instagram," said Tubi Chief Executive Anjali Sud.

For Tubi, it isn't enough to get eyeballs. The company needs to win over Gen Z viewers, whose attention is captured by TikTok or Instagram as much as television or even streaming, said Sud. More than 34% of Tubi viewers are between the ages of 18 and 34, according to the company.

That age group, which is largely part of Gen Z, is where the company thinks AI can help.

"As AI agents become a common way people navigate the internet, we're meeting viewers in the moment they're deciding what to watch," said Mike Bidgoli, Tubi's chief product and technology officer.

Tubi also is supercharging its personalization efforts with AI and opening up its platform to AI-created content -- all in service of boosting ad revenue and keeping viewers on the platform.

The streamer owned by Fox Corp. declined to share the dollar amount of its investment in AI. Fox and The Wall Street Journal's parent company, News Corp, share common ownership.

From machine learning to LLMs

The introduction of machine learning models in Tubi's platform a decade ago enabled personalized recommendations for viewers -- and, in turn, helped its advertisers target specific audiences, said Bidgoli.

The company has a large data set at its disposal, according to Bidgoli. Their models are fed by the one billion hours that more than 100 million viewers stream each month on Tubi's platform, and a content library of over 300,000 titles that the company says is the largest among its peers.

"The [AI] model has to optimize for just one metric always. Engagement," Sud said.

More recently, Tubi combined large language models, or LLMs, with deep learning techniques -- enabling it to better understand "the nature of the user's intent," Bidgoli says. For instance, an LLM can predict a user's viewing patterns the way it predicts text from a few letters or words. The company uses a variety of commercial LLMs and its own custom model.

That means Tubi can create a level of "hyper-personalization" -- suggesting more personalized shows and movies, as well as ads, based on data like a user's location and time of viewing, as well as watch history and even what's in the content.

The company says it automatically plays AI-selected scenes from movies, individualized to viewers as they scroll, and it can create a trail of digital breadcrumbs for them to follow as they delve deeper into subgenres.

"We understand the script, we understand the plot, the subgenre and all of these other things," Bidgoli said. "We feed that back in the model, and now we can find someone something that's hyper-personalized for them, but also that foundation helps on the advertising side."

One of the company's ad products, called Tubi Moments, uses AI to tag scenes within movies and shows, reflecting the scene's tone, sentiment and visual cues. In practice, that means a scene featuring a drink gets labeled as a category a beverage maker can buy -- allowing the beverage maker to display their ad during the movie's ad breaks.

"This is something that would have absolutely not been doable two years ago," Bidgoli added.

David Joyce, a Seaport Research Partners media analyst, said part of the reason Tubi has been able to capture audiences -- especially young people -- is because the platform is easy to use and doesn't inundate viewers with ads. But that also puts Tubi in competition with social-media apps. "Since it's so easy to access Tubi on your smartphone, it's just as easy to access TikTok and Instagram," Joyce said.

Tubi, which has about 700 employees, generated more than $1.1 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue. Fox said Tubi turned profitable in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, and Tubi finished fiscal 2025 with about a 2.2% share of all television viewing, according to Nielsen. Tubi's revenue rose 19% in its most recent quarter compared with the prior period.

Boosting employees and creators

Tubi is making a few other bets in AI. In 2023, the company released a feature called Rabbit AI, which uses OpenAI's models to help viewers find what they want to watch.

Inside the company, Tubi is using AI to improve employee productivity. Ninety percent of Tubi's coding pull requests are written by AI coding assistants, Bidgoli said, and it has launched AI agents to accelerate other aspects of its software engineering and business processes.

One engineer even requested a few Nvidia H100 graphics processing units to run some experiments in the San Francisco office. Bidgoli said he obliged because the numbers worked out. "We're like, 'OK, go and rack it up,'" he said.

Bidgoli and Sud also say that AI tools are going to supercharge creators and people who make video content. A platform like Tubi, they said, isn't only open to partnering with AI-assisted filmmakers and other creators, but aims to help them earn an income.

"It's going to lower the barrier," Bidgoli said. "We want the stories from these sort of creators, and we're going to let them have a shot."

Write to Belle Lin at belle.lin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 09, 2026 07:00 ET (11:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.