Reprising the dual-pronged approach of last February’s Super Bowl, Fox Corp. streaming service Tubi will stream a marquee NFL game on Thanksgiving Day in a simulcast with Fox Sports.
The Detroit Lions-Green Bay Packers matchup is set to kick off at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, November 27. The Fox broadcast will also be shown on the free, ad-supported Tubi, with the latter featuring local advertising from Fox’s portfolio of local TV stations.
When Fox first acquired Tubi in 2020, it kept it at a strict remove from any live fare, including news and sports. In 2022, Fox Corp. COO John Nallen said at a Wall Street conference that the company offers a “guarantee” to its distribution partners that live coverage of the NFL, Major League Baseball and other sports isn’t “leaking into a free distribution environment somewhere else.” While local news and sports-themed documentary fare has been part of the programming mix, he added, “I don’t see Tubi being a platform for us for live news and sports,”
That view was easier to take a few million pay-TV households ago, but as cord-cutting maintains its pace, there has been more willingness to experiment at the edges. Fox has also, after vowing to stay out of the subscription streaming wars, dipped a toe in with the launch of Fox One.
In the case of Super Bowl LIX, Tubi was able to pull in an average minute audience of 13.6 million viewers, helping overall viewership set an all-time record. The stream was noteworthy as the first major technical test for Tubi, but its livestream stayed up and shoulder programming around the game also helped the streaming service make the most of the high-profile day.
Last year’s Thanksgiving Day game on Fox between the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants was the most-watched regular-season NFL game of the year, averaging 38.8 million viewers. Because both the Lions and Packers are playoff contenders and longtime divisional rivals with fan bases that extend beyond their own cities, this year’s Thanksgiving match-up holds ample promise.