What is Tubi?

Tubi is the world's largest free premium content AVOD streaming service. Tubi is available on web, mobile, OTT and CTV platforms. The majority of Tubi’s revenue is generated from OTT platforms like Fire Tv and Roku.

Impact

25% lift in registrations between control and treatment
New Visitor Registration rates grew from 10% to 65%
55% users in treatment now using ‘Sign in with phone’
As expected, the experience drove a non-marginal increase in mobile app installs-- 15% of the treatment authentications were authenticated by a new mobile install. TVT and revenue were all positive.

Experiment Design & Eventing Requirements

Background

In 2019 Tubi executives aligned that increasing registration rates across all platforms would be a key company priority. Previously, it wasn't. For the last couple years the company was laser focused on driving up TVT (total viewing time) at the expense of other KPIs, like registration.

TVT, Tubi’s North Star metric, is the result of two inputs— the number of viewers and AVT (average view time per user). In streaming, content really is king, and the answer to the question, “How might we increase engagement and stickiness?” is simple: build or buy the best content. And while Tubi’s library was evolving, it did not have a Netflix/Disney/ATT scale war chest to dramatically increase content spend. Hence, AVT and retention had been relatively flat for years.

On the flip side, to this point in the company’s history, increasing viewers was relatively easy. It was simply a UA game limited by our defined CAC-to-LTV ratio. Consequently, Tubi's YOY TVT growth was primarily driven by converting new visitors to viewers, and sustaining our existing retention rates and AVT. The implication of a 'TVT driven by new viewer acquisition’ strategy is that any feature that impacted new and returning user viewing conversion, like prompting for registration, would have to be deprioritized.

So what changed? As with most company's growth trajectory, our CAC was trending up, UA becoming less efficient. Tubi moved on from paying for large cohorts of our best customers, to large cohorts of marginal customers. Given the CAC trend, it was time to double down on extracting more value from our existing customers-- it was time to focus on retention and AVT-- time to focus on authentication.

The Value of Authentication

With the leadership team aligned on prioritizing authentication, as the Product Owner I had to clearly define the user and business value to evangelize my mission with all stakeholders and inspire the core product team. Here are the three pillars.