Tubi’s push into kids content has been a recent—and dramatic—growth story.

The company has been on a run in the kids & family market, securing a string of high-profile kids content deals, including with the likes of Sesame Workshop and Warner Bros. Discovery. In March, the free streamer saw its kids & family titles generate 170 million total viewing hours, a 70% year-over-year increase, according to the AVOD. 

Meanwhile, strong viewership on its acquired YA titles pointed to an opportunity for the streamer to take a swing on its own originals for the demo. The AVOD selected Sidelined: The QB and Me (2024, pictured above), a story that originated on Wattpad (the online fiction-publishing platform owned by WEBTOON) as its first YA original. That film was a breakout success, and spawned a sequel and spurred the company’s broader push into the market. 

Thanks to this success, the AVOD is developing more live-action YA content, and even has animated originals for kids in the works, which marks a big shift in direction for chief content officer Adam Lewinson. A seasoned media executive, Lewinson previously had roles at Disney (kids content remains a passion for him, he says), Columbia Pictures and FX. He joined Tubi in 2017, and has helped steadily build its library into one of the largest in streaming. 

In between new announcements and trips to line up new projects, Lewinson sat down with Kidscreen to pull back the curtain on its surging kids content plans, and how Tubi is very much open for business in the kids space. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

KS: Where does Tubi fit into the media industry today? 

Adam Lewinson, Tubi’s chief content officer: We believe the future of entertainment is free and on-demand, and we’ve got over a hundred million monthly active users at the moment, a billion hours per month of viewership. If you look at the AVOD space, just ad-supported video on demand, Tubi is number two behind YouTube—and [we have] obviously very different businesses. YouTube predominantly [has] short-form and tons of UGC, and Tubi is all long-form, professionally produced content, and 95% of our engagement is on-demand [as opposed to through the service’s live TV offerings]. So engagement is intentional. 

Part of the programming strategy is we believe in depth of content around a fandom. So if you’re a fan of a particular type of content, young adult, kids cartoons, any category, we bring viewers down our rabbit hole and then we offer them incredibly deep engagement and discovery. 

What has the growth of Tubi’s kids content been like? 

AL: Our kids & family business and our young adult business have all exponentially been growing after the past couple of years. It has been intentional, but also we have to match the signals that we see from our viewers. We’re a very data-driven company; every streamer has massive amounts of data to sift through, and so you look for signals. In kids & family, similarly, we’ve just been growing that over time. In a subscription-heavy streaming environment, Tubi shows up differently for families with this depth-of-catalogue, with a free, frictionless experience that invites discovery, and that’s really what’s made us one of the largest destinations for kids content and streaming.

Part of our mission today is we’re democratizing access to this high-quality kids programming, and for a parent, there’s no subscriptions, there’s no pressure, so it’s a real meaningful differentiator in our business versus this increasingly fragmented paid ecosystem.

KS: What value does Tubi see in kids & family content?   

AL: Co-viewing is a factor. Nostalgia viewing, or as we often like to call it, ‘newstalgia’ viewing [when viewers discover an old property for the first time]. And then also global storytelling, especially on the kids & family side. Animation is often a tool for global storytelling. 

Right now, you can watch one of the Ice Age movies on Tubi. That franchise has proven to be one of the biggest global hits, and I think similarly to Tom and Jerry cartoons, it’s more about the physical action, it’s less about the dialogue, so it’s very easy to localize. So kids & family content can resonate globally in ways that other genres [might not]. 

KS: Tubi is growing its YA business quickly. What was the business process behind this push? 

AL: Our young adult strategy started with Sidelined: The QB & Me, roughly a year and a half ago, based on an incredibly popular Wattpad novel. Wattpad is a great source of YA IP from writers. We made the sequel, Sidelined 2, which premiered last November and it’s really just been a smash success for us, with 20 million viewers across the franchise to date. 

Sidelined: The QB and Me was Tubi’s first big swing into original YA, and its success is driving the AVOD to go for more touchdowns with the demo.

Before Sidelined, we had seen signals that a young adult-type story could work incredibly well for us based on some acquired content. Sidelined was our first big swing, and obviously its success encouraged us to scale. So that led to How to Lose a Popularity Contest [in January], Kissing is the Easy Part [in February]—both of those Canadian produced, by the way. 

We have a few more that we’ve announced that are in various stages of production. We have a movie called Game On, which is basically a Cinderella story in the gaming world through the lens of a young woman and a romance story. We have Remember Me, based on a very popular novel that’s YA storytelling through the lens of murder-mystery thriller—our female lead is investigating murder and the murder that she is investigating is her own. I just watched the first cut of it and it’s great and thrilling and moving, based on a very popular novel by Christopher Pike. And we’ve certainly got more in the pipeline. In fact, we’ll have an announcement soon. Stay tuned.

KS: What is your strategy on the kids side? 

AL: The backbone does start with licensed content; that’s the depth and scale. To use Scooby-Doo as an example, it’s an iconic franchise and we see kids viewing Scooby-Doo, as one would expect, [and] we also see older demos watching Scooby-Doo, because it’s family co-viewing, which has always been a very important part of the kids & family business, [and] it’s also nostalgia viewing. 

Recently, we put up huge portions of the Cartoon Network library in a partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery. Ed, Edd and Eddy, Dexter’s Laboratory and more to follow. And those titles have really activated viewers—so much excitement across social media that they were coming, which translates into the numbers. And again, these are new shows for younger audiences. I think in many cases what we’re seeing are parents who say, ‘I grew up on Ed, Ed and Eddy and I’m going to show my kids,’ so then it becomes that family co-viewing experience. 

And we also go back a bit further than Cartoon Network to the old WB with Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain, and those also have proven to be successful alongside just storied franchises that we’ve had for some time, such as Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. We also have Pokémon, Strawberry Shortcake, many of the LEGO titles, Yu-Gi-Oh, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Transformers [and more]. 

We bring in one of the biggest kids franchises in Asia, which is Anpanman. It’s a superhero character, he’s quite iconic throughout Asia, and so for the first time ever we have a partnership with the producers to bring Anpanman cartoons to North America. We also do content with creators [such as] Like Nastya. It’s a creator-driven kid show which also does well. I think we have an unrivaled assortment of iconic kids IPs.

I want to mention our recent deal where we have 250 episodes of Sesame Street spanning from the show’s very beginning through season 38. They have so many different seasons, and every quarter we’re going to be refreshing episodes. And that obviously is some of the best preschool content and some of the best educational content that’s ever been produced. I feel really good about putting my kids, when they were younger, down to watch Sesame Street. The narrative storytelling, and the learnings, and the teachable moments in Sesame Street endure over all of these decades, and the opportunity for these episodes to be available for free for viewers has proven to be very meaningful.

KS: What are Tubi’s plans for original kids animation? 

AL: As you know well, animation takes quite some time. There is a good bit of planning that goes into it. One of my favorite kids originals that we’ve done is called Lloyd of the Flies, produced by Aardman Animations, [which features] Aardman’s stellar style, really immaculate animation and great character work, and [it’s] incredibly funny. 

There’s more coming in the kids original space. Sorry to tease, but there’s an announcement coming soon.

KS: Scary content for kids has long been a trend. We’re seeing Tubi go after the genre in YA films like Pumpkinhead. How has it been working for you? 

AL: There’s gateway horror, [like] with R.L. Stine. It’s not about the gore, it’s just about thrills and chills, but really for, let’s say, people 13-plus. We continue to have tremendous success with Goosebumps and the original series The Haunting Hour, both by R.L. Stine—those are acquired series, but kid-friendly for that tween and older space. 

Last October for Halloween we produced R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead, based on one of his short stories, another breakout success for us. And we’ve announced the sequel, Pumpkinhead 2. And we have more to follow in the R.L. Stine space.

R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead, about teens fighting back against a curse, was another breakout hit for the AVOD, and there’s more R.L. Stine to come, including a Pumpkinhead sequel, Lewinson says.

That’s been a really good extension of our young adult strategy, and really just follows the consumption, because as kids get older they like the thrills and the chills. Horror becomes more interesting.

KS: So it’s about maintaining kid viewers as they age up? 

AL: We’re in an era of television [where] ad-supported advertisers are always looking for that 18-to-34 demo, which is increasingly hard to find in linear and increasingly hard to find in streaming. At this point over half of our viewers are either Gen Z or Millennial, so certainly skewing younger. We’ve proven [we can reach the demo] with franchises like Sidelined, and these other movies that I’ve mentioned. They’ve all been successful for us.

KS: What are you most excited about as Tubi aims to grow in the kids & family space?

AL:  That co-viewing experience I think is really key to television viewing, [but] it’s gotten lost as we’ve lost the monoculture. And so this kids & family [content is] really key to getting families together in the living room again. To watch on the same screen and have the same shared communal experience, that gets me up in the morning. So what you can count on with Tubi is much more of that to follow. 

Images courtesy of Tubi. 

The interview was edited for clarity and length.