Ad-supported video streaming service Tubi TV raises $20M Series B led by Jump Capital
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2017, Tubi's $20M Series B was a bet that free, ad-supported streaming could stand alongside the subscription wave — at a time when rivals were raising on the SVOD side, including FuboTV's $55M Series C just weeks later with Sky, 21st Century Fox, and Scripps participating.
The bet paid off on the acquirer's side of the table: three years later, Fox — already a FuboTV investor — chose to buy its way into ad-supported streaming outright with a $440M all-cash acquisition of Tubi, financed largely by selling down its Roku stake. That exit retroactively validates what Jump Capital underwrote in this round.
First-order effects
- Tubi gains capital to expand its licensed content library and ad infrastructure without charging viewers, keeping its cost structure distinct from subscription rivals like FuboTV.
- Jump Capital takes a lead position in one of the few pure-play AVOD startups of 2017 — a stake that ultimately cleared a large multiple when Fox's $440M cash deal landed in 2020.
Second-order effects
- Media incumbents stop choosing between models: Fox's participation in FuboTV's round followed by its outright purchase of Tubi shows broadcasters hedging by holding both subscription and ad-supported positions simultaneously.
- Capital follows the ad dollar into adjacent layers of the stack — measurement startups like TVision raised to verify whether streaming ads actually get seen, and venue-focused players like Atmosphere TV later pulled in $100M-plus rounds on the same ad-funded premise.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ad-supported tiers become a structural component of nearly every streaming service rather than a niche category — pushing legacy pay-TV distributors toward set-top-free delivery models of the kind MobiTV raised $50M to enable, and making ad measurement a competitive requirement across the industry.
The trend: Ad-supported video streaming is evolving from a 2017 contrarian bet into a core pillar of streaming economics, with media conglomerates eventually acquiring rather than building their AVOD capabilities.