Fox hunts $500m acquisition of Tubi

Fox Corporation has expressed interest in acquiring Tubi, the ad-supported streaming service that carries reruns of TV show and movies, in a move to complement its subscription offerings.

In a deal which is reportedly worth more than $500 million, the TV broadcasting and cable company would be adding a streaming component to its business, offering over 20,000 pieces of content for free to its users.

According to sources familiar with the matter in a report by the Wall Street Journal, the expansion by Fox comes after the dismantling of 21^st Century Fox and with the sale of 20^th Century Fox’s assets to Disney last year, the entertainment giant is looking at ways to compete.

• Read more: Disney completes $71.3bn Fox acquisition

Earlier this month, Tubi announced record growth for 2019 with its total view time over 163 million hours watched in December alone, and its year-on-year growth accelerating by 160%.

Its monthly active users were 25 million and plans to accelerate content spending to exceed nine figures in 2020 to push its current content library beyond its 20,000 film and TV programmes.

In a separate report by the WSJ, NBCUniversal is reportedly in “advanced talks” to acquire supermarket giant Walmart’s free streaming and movie rental site Vudu.

The terms of the agreement remain unknown including when the purchase would go into effect, however, was reported the acquisition would see Vudu merged with Fandango Now, the online video transaction site that is part of the Fandango ticket service as well as another part of the NBCUniversal portfolio.

Walmart acquired Vudu in 2010 for $100 million, and rumours emerged towards the end of last year that it was seeking to offload the service.

Last year, Viacom, which has now rebranded as ViacomCBS, acquired free-streaming service Pluto TV for $340 million in cash and set to launch this summer is Comcast and NBCUniversal’s Peacock service.

• Read more: ViacomCBS accelerates to serve addressable audiences