Tubi Launches AI-Powered 'Scenes' Feature to Enhance Content Discovery

Tubi's New App Feature Goes Beyond Thumbnails to Help You Find Something to Watch

Though Kourtnee hasn't won any journalism awards yet, she's been a Netflix streaming subscriber since 2012 and knows the magic of its hidden codes. Do you watch movie clips on TikTok that get you curious? Tubi is introducing a new feature on its mobile app to entice you to discover something new -- or different -- to stream. The free streaming service rolled out Scenes for iOS and Android on Thursday, a function that enables viewers to watch short clips from its extensive library of content. If you watch a video clip that you like, you can either save it to watch later or stream it at that moment. "We want to meet viewers where they are, and in mobile, this means we have to create these entertainment experiences for these viewers on the go," Tubi's Chief Product and Technology Officer Mike Bidgoli told CNET. Scenes is designed to give viewers access to 60- to 90-second short videos along with the full-length versions of TV episodes and films, an experience that Bidgoli said is typically limited to either TV streaming or social media, but not all-in-one. Scenes is located in its own tab within the Tubi app, and you can scroll through brief scenes from tens of thousands of titles. If you enjoy something you've seen in Scenes, you have several options: Watch the full-length video on the spot, hit Save to add it to your watchlist or click the Like button to help sharpen Tubi's recommendations to match your tastes. Some viewers may choose to keep flipping through Scenes on mobile as if they're watching TikTok videos. Once you save a title, you can watch it on any device where Tubi is available. The function aims to help viewers explore Tubi's hefty catalog of shows and movies while enhancing personalization. How are the most intriguing slices of content selected? Through a combination of AI-powered machine learning tools and Tubi's team of curators, Scenes clips are plucked from a title and surfaced for users. The more you use it, the more the algorithm will get to know you. Scenes is among Tubi's latest initiatives, which include the recent rollout of its fan-driven Stubios project and its Rabbit AI feature launched in 2023. The free streamer recently logged more than 81 million active users and has over 300 original titles on its platform, which houses a slate of live channels and 250,000-plus movies and TV show episodes.

Tubi's new Scenes feature plays clips to help you find your next binge

Tubi, Fox's free ad-supported streaming TV service (FAST), boasts a content library of more than 250,000 movies and TV episodes and 200 live TV channels, which makes finding something to watch a tricky proposition. Today, however, Tubi's 81 million active users are getting a new way to help them find something to watch in the form of Scenes, a feature that serves up short clips of your favorite shows and movies on your mobile device. With Scenes, which can now be found in the Tubi app's navigation bar on iOS and Android devices, serves up access to "tens of thousands" of clips of a user's favorite shows and movies that they can scroll a la TikTok or Reels, all based on the content that they like and add to their "My List" inventory. Recommended Videos Tubi says in a press release that Scenes leverages Tubi's machine learning engine and AI models to deliver a "personalization experience ... to surface fandoms and rabbit holes to discover and explore," designed to address the needs of their users that are on the go. As with any algorithm, as users continue to save to their My List, recommendations get increasingly personalized to their tastes. Once saved to a user's My List, they can be accessed to watch from any of the devices that Tubi is available on, such as streaming devices from Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV to Google Chromecast, Android TV, TiVo, and Google TV. "Currently, users either get a shrunk down version of their TV streaming app on their phones or are limited to quick vertical videos on social platforms. We believe there's a better way to meet the needs of mobile users on the go, allowing them to watch both short form video and long form within the same app," said Mike Bidgoli, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Tubi. "By creating features that leverage the strengths of each device, we can create an effortlessly entertaining experience for viewers looking for quick bursts of entertainment on the go that transition seamlessly to their living rooms." Tubi is one of the best advertising video on demand (AVOD)/ FAST services in the world, serving a combination of on-demand titles and live TV for free -- that is, without a monthly subscription. The compromise is, unlike the big boys of the streaming service world, you have to watch some relatively non-intrusive or overwhelming ads.

Tubi just dropped a new AI-powered feature that will help you pick free movies and shows to watch -- here's how it works

Tubi is one of the best free streaming services we've tested. It has over 250,000 free movies and TV episodes. That's a lot to sort through if you're looking for something to watch. But Tubi might have just made it a lot easier to find something to watch. The free streaming service just launched Tubi Scenes, a brand-new feature available to all Tubi users in the U.S. right now. The way it works is by giving you a feed of movie and show clips -- dubbed "Scenes" -- that you can then use to launch into watching the full movie or episode. The feature is part of what Tubi's Chief Product and Technology Officer Mike Bidgoli calls "effortless entertainment," and it uses AI and your phone to make it all work. Ready to check it out? Here's how Tubi Scenes works. As I mentioned, this is an AI-powered feature. But it's not completely AI -- which is a good thing. Scenes starts, well ... behind the scenes. Tubi uses AI and machine learning to trawl through the hundreds of thousands of hours of free movies and shows on the platform, and then creates a pool of AI-generated clips from those movies and shows. Once that pool is created, Tubi then uses humans to curate the Scenes that will show up in your Scenes feed. At present, Tubi says there are "tens of thousands" of clips but that the catalog is "ever-growing." Practically for you, the user, that stuff doesn't matter. You won't notice any of that. What you will notice though, is that when you open the Tubi app on your iOS or Android device, there will now be an icon that says "Scenes" in the bottom navigation bar. If you tap on that icon, Scenes will start playing on your phone and a new user interface will pop up. With this UI, you'll have the option to watch the movie or show the Scene is from, like the Scene or save the Scene to My List. After saving Scenes to MyList, you can queue up My List on any of the 30+ devices where Tubi is available and start watching the corresponding movie or show episode. There are a few things I like about Scenes and some reasons why I get why Tubi would launch a feature like this. Bidgoli claims that the average person "takes 10 minutes to find something" to watch. If that number is accurate, providing a feature that cuts that time down is -- on paper -- a win for users. I also like the route Tubi has taken when it comes to the use of AI in Scenes. Creating the Scenes with AI increases productivity, and increases the number of movies and shows that can be included in the feature. Using AI to make recommendations increasingly personalized the more you use Scenes also makes sense. But I'm glad that it's humans curating what does and doesn't make the cut. As someone who used to cover generative AI from Tom's Guide, I can easily see it producing some bad Scenes. If the feature is filled with bad Scenes, users will stop using it. My concern about Scenes is whether users start using it at all. I like the cross-platform functionality of My List, but I'm not sure that's how people actually watch TV. If you're watching on a TV, are you going to pull out your phone to search through Scenes first? Or are you just going to fiddle around on the TV app? And will people spend mindless scrolling time on the Tubi app finding stuff to watch later? Or are they just going to stick to social media? The answer to all these questions could be yes, but I'm not so sure. I think it's more likely that users mostly use Scenes on a mobile device to watch a movie or show on that same mobile device. But given how many people now watch on phones and tablets, even that could still make Scenes a big success for Tubi.