Tubi Takes Viewers Down the Rabbit Hole With AI-Powered Recommendations

Artificial intelligence is coming to Tubi.

Rolling out in beta today, the Fox-owned AVOD is using OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 to help viewers find new content.

Tubi has 74 million monthly active users and a catalog of more than 200,000 and movies TV episodes, and the company hopes Rabbit AI will make it easier for customers to navigate the platform.

“The reason why we have such a big library is so that you can find specifically what you’re looking for—no matter how niche or strange, we’ll get it to you,” Nicole Parlapiano, Tubi’s CMO, told Adweek.

The feature will show up on the bottom of Tubi’s mobile app and is designed to let users ask questions in the same way they would talk to a friend, whether that’s “shark movies that are funny” or “scary movies with clowns.”

It builds on Tubi’s already existing suite of content discovery tools, and search history will be saved for ease of navigation.

Currently only available in beta through Tubi’s iOS mobile app, it will be more widely released in the coming weeks. It’s also an option for existing OpenAI subscribers.

The queries will also improve Tubi’s metadata on the backend, which will allow for the creation of more “microgenres” and rabbit holes to further improve content suggestion.

“Some of the microgenres we’re seeing are ‘slice of life anime’ or ‘magical realism romance,’” Dana Balch, Tubi’s director of product and consumer communications, told Adweek. “It’s still in early stages. The feature works incredibly well but as we continue to learn from it, it’ll be able to handle more hyper-specific queries.”

Down the Rabbit hole

Earlier this month, Tubi debuted its fall brand campaign “Just Keep Going,” done in collaboration with Mischief, to coincide with the launch of Rabbit AI.

It builds on the company’s viral Super Bowl campaign that first introduced the notion of rabbit holes.

It includes four new spots, out-of-home creative in New York and more than a dozen spots geared toward football fans.

“We’re just a little out there, and we celebrate your individuality and you being out there in any way, shape or form. That’s really where the campaign lies on the hero spots,” said Parlapiano. “We really just wanted to be smart and lean into it, and there’s a lot in this campaign because that’s just Tubi. It’s not just one thing, it’s something different for everybody.”

Each film in the campaign spotlights different genres on Tubi with an element that seemingly never ends, culminating with Tubi’s call to action for viewers to “find their rabbit hole.”

“With those rabbit holes, it’s hard to follow what someone’s journey could be,” said Parlapiano. “That thrill of discovery and finding something you didn’t know existed is sort of a lost art. You go to the SVODs and you know what you want to watch, and Tubi just serves a different use case. We really wanted to further that message and have a bunch of spots that explain how that could look.”