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Tubi Logo
A free streaming service with a large library
6 / 10  Review Rating

Netflix and Hulu have some new competition from free streaming services like Crackle and Pluto TV. These newer services have a different business model from the subscription systems that we’ve seen from Netflix, Hulu, and Max. Instead of offering paid memberships, Crackle and its ilk are totally free and ad-supported.

Tubi or not Tubi? That is the question I set out to answer in this Tubi review. I like streaming services, and I love a free price tag. However, I usually find that the content offered by free streaming services falls flat, especially when compared with the wide array of blockbuster and original content available on services like Max and Hulu.

When I saw that Tubi had partnerships with MGM, Paramount, and Lionsgate, they had my attention. I was hopeful that they would finally be the free service I’d been looking for. So how did they do against the big-name paid services? Do they even stand out amongst other free services like Pluto TV and Crackle? I was ready to find out, and I hope you are, too!

Tubi Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Absolutely free
  • Very infrequent commercials
  • Available on all major streaming devices
  • Lots of movies, including top titles featuring big stars
  • Kids section and parental controls
  • Seamless interface

Cons

  • Most content is at least four years old
  • No option to upgrade to an ad-free plan
  • Many titles not in HD and none in 1080p or 4K
  • Only live streaming content is “News on Tubi,” available only on select devices
  • Limited selection of TV shows

 

Is Tubi TV the Best Free Streaming Service? We were impressed when we tested Tubi, but there’s plenty of competition in the world of free streaming. Check out our list of the best free streaming services to see if Tubi came out on top.

 

What You Can Watch on Tubi

Tubi Free Content
What Tubi looks like in your browser

Tubi works like pretty much any other on-demand streaming service. You go to the website or download the app, and you are ready to start watching content. In other words, it’s like Netflix with ads. You can create an account (more on that later), but you don’t have to. The only content they have that is not on-demand is a relatively new feature called “News on Tubi” — a set of live streaming news channels that have only rolled out on a few devices at this point.

I came to Tubi looking for great content, and they did not disappoint. They don’t do original content, and most of their content is at least four years old. But those are limitations I’ve come to expect from free services. What I didn’t expect was the sheer number of movies that I’d been meaning to watch — and now had access to for free! Tubi says there are 20,000 titles on their service, and it certainly feels like that many to me.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its sequel, After Earth, and Batman vs. Robin all immediately got added to my watch list, along with about two dozen other movies. After scrolling a bit, I came across the “Not on Netflix” section, which had some more great options that – unsurprisingly – were not available on Netflix. These included films with Sasha Baron Cohen, Jason Statham, and Nicolas Cage.

Tubi Content Not on Netflix
Tired of finding titles you've already watched on Netflix? Tubi understands.

Do you like reality TV? It’s okay, you can admit it here. I’ll admit to enjoying a cooking or singing show once in a while if you do. I think I found enough reality TV on Tubi to keep me going for quite a while. Two of Gordon Ramsay’s shows are there, as are The Masked Singer, Hoarders, The Bachelor, and many others.

Although reality TV is definitely where Tubi shines, that’s not all that I watched: As a sitcom junkie, I was also happy to see Anger Management and Grounded for Life in Tubi’s library, too.

If you are looking for classics, this is probably not the place to find them – the selection of older TV shows did not seem as extensive as those of other free streaming services.

I’m an unashamed cartoon fan, so I also looked into the Tubi Kids section. They have The Adventures of Batman – the ones from the 1960s! Once my nostalgia moment was over, I took a look through the rest of the section and found How to Train Your Dragon, Free Birds, and a few other favorites. Their anime section was also impressive for a free service, but it can’t compete with Crunchyroll. If you are looking for content for younger kids, Tubi does have preschool and baby sections as well.

How It Felt to Use Tubi

If you’ve used Netflix, you’ll feel right at home with the Tubi interface. It’s simple, clean, and very easy-to-use. In short: I love it.

Tubi Homepage
Tubi on the Fire TV Stick looks really familiar, doesn't it?

The available titles are all displayed in categories either by genre or common options like “Most Popular” or “Recently Added”. Unlike with some services, there is no option to filter the titles or rearrange them by, for example, alphabetical order. There is, however, an option to search. Having tried out other free services that didn’t have this, Tubi reminded me just how important a search bar can be. I was immediately able to find all 12 Nicolas Cage movies that are on the service. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but I found them.

Browsing for TV shows turned out to be more difficult. Tubi’s web interface has TV shows mixed in with the movies instead of in their own section. Tubi seems to have far more movies than TV shows, so the shows tend to get lost in the mix. Fortunately, the mobile app has separate TV and movie sections, so I was able to find TV show options more easily there. This was the only significant feature of the mobile app that I couldn’t also find on the web browser app, but it was available on other streaming devices, like the Fire TV Stick.

It turned out this wasn’t the only usability feature that was missing on the in-browser app. When I started using my Fire TV Stick Tubi app, I noticed the additional menu options for categories and channels. The channels option was particularly exciting because it gave me the ability to find all of the Fox content, including titles that I had missed when browsing through Tubi’s library in my browser. I just hope Tubi brings these features to its in-browser app eventually!

I wanted to find other things to complain about with the interface, but I just couldn’t. Try as I might, nothing about it was glitchy or even cumbersome. The most critical thing I can think of to say is that the pause, rewind, and skip forward buttons sometimes appear over the closed captions. When I’m digging that deep for a complaint, I’m not sure I should even bother to complain at all. In my view, Tubi has a great interface that makes for an even greater user experience.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by low commercial counts in free services before, but Tubi took it to a new level. I would often watch for more than 30 minutes without seeing a single commercial. When they did pop up, it was usually in groups of two to three. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather that number was zero, but I consider Tubi’s ad load to be absolutely reasonable for a free service.

Tubi Features and Streaming Quality

The video quality on Tubi was decent, but it was nothing to write home about. Most titles are available in 720p HD, but none are in full 1080p HD. There are also several that are only in standard definition. In the browser app, you can adjust the video quality at will between whichever options are available. On other devices, there is no option to adjust, and some of the quality was clearly SD where I had hoped for HD.

Both the audio and closed caption languages seem to be limited to English in almost every case on Tubi, with the exception of a few Spanish-language movies and TV shows. I couldn’t find a single English title with non-English subtitle options. I also found several titles that didn’t have subtitles at all.

Tubi gives you full control over the closed captions wherever they’re available: You can change the background, size, color, font, and transparency at will. I usually don’t find features like these to be useful, but increasing the font size does have its advantages at times.

As with most free services, account creation is not required for Tubi. I went ahead and created one anyway to check out the features. If you are concerned with privacy, though, you could watch Tubi forever without signing up. Signing up for an account offers two main advantages for most users: the ability to mark items to watch later and the ability to pause a show and continue it later on the same or different devices.

Tubi Parental Controls
Yes, Tubi does have parental controls

If you’re a parent, I’d recommend creating an account: You’ll need one if you’re going to use Tubi’s parental control features. I was impressed that these features were included at all. This is another place where Tubi feels like more than just another free streaming service.

Tubi Platform Support

Not all platforms are created equal – only streaming devices have this channel view
Not all platforms are created equal – only streaming devices have this channel view

Tubi is available on pretty much any device you can think of. They have an in-browser app for your computer, mobile apps on iOS and Android, and apps for streaming devices like Roku and Chromecast. They even have apps for Xbox (Xbox One, Series X, and Series S) and PlayStation (Playstation 3 and 4).

The interfaces in Tubi’s apps do vary somewhat from device to device. In my opinion, the additional ways of looking for titles that are available on streaming devices make for a much more pleasant experience.

The only other major difference between the Tubi experiences on different platforms emerges when Tubi rolls out new features, which often appear on a select set of devices early on. That’s happening right now with the new “News on Tubi” live stream feature, for example: It’s only currently available on Android, Roku, and Amazon Fire devices, but it will be available on all Tubi devices eventually.

Tubi App
The Tubi experience on the iOS mobile app. Since I'm watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I want to call it my “shell” phone.

Tubi Value

In my book, an experience this good with a $0 price tag is a great value. What more can I say? As much as I would like to get some content from the last three to four years, Tubi more than met my expectations for a free service. There is no paid ad-free option, which is something to keep in mind if the ads are a dealbreaker for you. Barring that, I think you’ll agree that this service offers a pretty great value given its non-existent price tag.

Tubi Review: My Verdict

I judge a free service by whether they waste my time and whether they offer more annoyance than value. Tubi isn’t perfect. I would like a few more ways of browsing the titles, and I would love some newer (and preferably full HD) content.

But, overall, I’m really happy with what I found. Tubi won’t become my main streaming service anytime soon, but that’s the beauty of the free price tag — I can keep this service around without adding to my expenses. Given my experience with Tubi, this was a no-brainer: Tubi’s app has earned a permanent spot on my streaming devices.

173 thoughts on “Tubi Review

  1. Dildo says:

    Admans daydream!
    Watched a half hour program with 8 ads! Worse than OTA tc,even Fox,and thats hard to do! Irritating,frustrating,total crap! Dont waste your time!

  2. B. Henry says:

    He belongs to me on Tubi is not even worth seeing the actors need to go back to school for more rehearsal because they didn’t play none of those scenes correct!!!!!!

  3. Lorraine says:

    This to be up sucks I started watching a movie on it after an hour of trying to get onto the app with doing stupid passwords and bullshit watched half the movie had to put it on hold when we tried to go back and watch it the movie is no longer on Tubi it didn’t even save it so we can watch the rest of the movie now the movie is no longer on to be eight hours later this freaking app sucks

  4. Fred says:

    Highly recommend Tubi TV free streaming. Minimal commercials; about half the commercials than over the air TV. No problem with the streaming service, it is smooth, and is easy to go forward or backward. The interface is easy to navigate. Easy to search movies, TV shows, and News and whatever else is offered. Try it, you’ll like it.

    1. Wayne W says:

      LOL Stop it TUBITV. NOBODY WATCHES BECAUSE OF ADS YOU OVERLOAD IT WITH. Every single person i know who downloaded the app, uninstalled it in disgust. NOBODY WATCHES IT !

  5. J says:

    Every time I try to watch a show it plays for about 1 minute or less and then it just stops and goes back to the beginning of the app. Very unhappy going to disable it on my TV

  6. monty says:

    I was looking for a service that had Fox news…. all the lefties of course prohibit it but I found “Fox Now” news today and It had the added benefit of a lower resolution so it would run without buffering on Visible hotspot. No other legal service offers Fox news… none. Works well and it is free. Love it. Sorry to all the lefties and commies who had their brains laundered by teachers and professors…. you guys stick with cbs abc nbc cnn ….they are all the same so you can take your pick.

  7. Jay Decamp says:

    Great content, few commercials, and it makes accurate suggestions for what I want to watch next, I’m pretty happy with it. Watch it as much as net Flix and more than Amazon and it’s free.

  8. Jo says:

    6/2022

    Im sorry but we love Tubi, it’s free, the commercial are normal for anyone of the age of 40. We love the content, and ITS FREEE! Sorry Tubi, people are so hard to p,ease now.adays, I give it 5 stars

  9. Tina says:

    I thought is it my imagination that the commercials have more than doubled AND they are louder?

    NOPE! not imagined.

    Started running the same movie, same account, same time – but one on my old computer (that I always watch on) and one on my new computer that I’ve never watched Tubi on.

    Results: Older machine – commercials every 15-16 minutes – at least 5 commercials and not quiet

    New machine: roughly same timing, skipped one set though and only played at most 2 commericals at a time.

    Every break – an extra minute on the old machine for 7 additional minutes of commercials.

    The thing is – I hate liars and manipulators – but dang they do have a good old cheesy movie selection – and for example – can’t even stand Youtube at all – sick amounts of commerials.

    Solution – stop watching it all. Will try again.

    (oh, and screw you amazon and you PR commerical crap – still not shopping at small biz/econ killing crappy evil amazon – I hate you more for all the money you waste on commericals – if you didn’t pay so much – imagine what you could pay workers then idiots – anyone who shops at amazon needs an ethics course)

  10. Juju says:

    I was waiting for a particular part to come on in a movie I was watching and I noticed that it was cut out. I’m not interested in watching a movie with missing content. A waste..SMH..

  11. Mike says:

    We were forced to find other options when our cable box suddenly went out. I had gotten the Fire Stick from Amazon and kept meaning to look into using it but just never got around to it. We started to access its offerings and we were pleasantly surprised at the many apps that are available and there are LOTS! There are plenty of free ones and they all offer selections of a plethora of categories and titles.
    Then we found Tubi and we wished that we had found it sooner. The titles offered run from B grade to epic. After a week or so of watching just Tubi we feel that most of the movies are pretty good to great. For us the reason Tubi stands out is that after watching a particular movie is the ‘Continue Watching’ feature. This awesome feature suggests other movies with the same or similar subject matter. And again, the movies here are predominantly great movies! It also has our favorite local news station, Fox News.
    Tubi is the first app in our favorite’s bar, and with good reason. It’s where we start our day and it is where our day ends as well. We read other reviews and some mention picture quality and our opinion is that the picture quality is very high with no loss of definition.
    And to top it all off ITS FREE!!!
    ~ Enjoy & Be Well ~
    NOTE: Several reviews mention too many commercials. We do not experience excessive commercials – quite the opposite. We talked to a few fellow watchers and I think that the issue is with Signing In. Our son watches Tubi on his cell and occasionally on his tablet, both of which he elected to Sign In. That’s when the amount of commercials increased. We haven’t tested this theory as we only watch Tubi with the Fire Stick on our TV.
    Also, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it 😉

  12. Lorna Summey says:

    LDS says: 10/02/2022: I thought my TV went out. I have had problems with TUBI for the last week. The app was working fine until this week, so I uninstalled the app. Problem solved. I understand this is a free app, but if the folks can’t update the app to work properly it is not worth the headache.

  13. BrandieJ says:

    I agree that there are way too many and too frequent commercials.. I’m trying to watch 50 shades of Grey and it plays for like 6 minutes or so then just when it gets to a good part it goes to commercial or should I say commercials 6, 30 second, commercials to be exact.. it’s very frustrating and annoying.. there should be an option where you can watch like 10 min of commercials then watch your entire movie without interruption.. It would such watching 10 min strait of commercials but no worse than going to the movie theater and waiting for the movie to start…

  14. alface says:

    ONG
    the commercials … way too many… they cut themselves off… the APP freezes..
    glad its free
    they need to hire better programmers ..
    I am deleting this trash.

  15. Anonymous says:

    My beef about tubi is that when I watch a series and I want to know more about it and look online to the specific episode that tubi says it is, it isn’t that episode. For example, Im currently binge watching fantasy island and it says I’m watching season 4 episode 24 but in actuality it’s season 5 episode 3. I dont know which episode it decided to go off the rails but it is.

  16. Anonymous says:

    Dear Tubi, I used to like your movie, but every ad seems to be a gay camercle and I I’m not looking for to see something like that at all. If I could cut you off I would, but I can’t afford it. I would to see it all gone.

    1. Anonymous says:

      yup

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