There's a peculiar optimism in the entertainment industry right now, and it centres on a question that nobody has fully answered: just because someone can make you watch fifteen seconds of content doesn't mean they can sustain your attention for forty-five minutes. Yet Tubi and TikTok's Creatorverse Incubator program will select and support creators on the short-form social video giant to develop long-form shows for Tubi.
The partnership announced this week represents a larger cultural bet. Fox-owned Tubi is teaming with TikTok in the free streamer's latest push to bring creator-led content to its AVOD platform, with the Creatorverse Incubator program selecting and supporting creators to develop long-form shows for Tubi. Original series developed by TikTok creators who are chosen for the program will premiere exclusively on Tubi for a window (of yet-to-be-disclosed length), span a variety of genres and come in both scripted and unscripted formats.
Here's why it matters: Tubi's share of total ad-supported streaming viewing jumped from 2.2% in May 2025 to 6.2% in the fourth quarter of the same year, with the success coming on the heels of Tubi reaching profitability in 2024. That growth has given the free streaming service genuine ambitions. It wants to compete. And the fastest way to compete is to leverage audiences already built elsewhere. TikTok has 100 million monthly active users hungry for content from the creators they follow. Tubi sees a shortcut.
There is something genuinely smart about this approach. Tubi engages with creators that fit within the same parameters of the broader Tubi for Creators program: creators that have both an engaged following that aligns with Tubi's programming strategy focused on fandom genres like comedy, horror and coming-of-age and who are also multi-hyphenate storytellers that often have chops for a variety of creation aspects like producing, writing, shooting and acting. In other words, Tubi isn't grabbing random TikTok names. It's identifying people with actual production experience and audience loyalty across multiple formats.
But here's the rub: there's a reason TikTok became TikTok. The format works because it respects the velocity of attention. A fifteen-second clip can be a joke, a shock, a moment. It can end on a punchline and leave you laughing before you've even thought about it. A forty-five-minute episode requires something else entirely. It requires sustained narrative tension, character development, pacing decisions that operate on an entirely different logic. It requires you to care enough to come back next week.
The strategy mirrors that of Peacock, which enlisted TikTok creators last year to generate original content, indicating a trend among streaming platforms to tap into the popularity of social media influencers. But Peacock hasn't exactly set the world on fire with that strategy. Prime Video recently released Benito Skinner's show Overcompensating and is gearing up for the second season of MrBeast's Beast Games, while FX recently released Adults, a show featuring TikTok star Jack Innanen, with Tubi's approach centred on diving into genres that do particularly well on the platform, like horror, teen drama, and comedy.
The honest truth? Some of these bets will pay off. Tubi original movie Sidelined stars TikTok creator Noah Beck (he of 33 million followers), and was adapted from a well-known YA romance novel. That worked. Audiences followed. And it proves the concept can function when the conditions align. But that's a single data point, not a business model.
TikTok will help identify creators for potential participation in the program and Tubi plans to announce the initial slate later this summer. When those names drop, pay attention to the genres. If Tubi is smart, it won't try to transplant TikTok's rapid-fire comedy sensibility into traditional episode structure. Instead, it might lean into forms that can sustain themselves through different rhythms: serialised drama, competition shows, unscripted reality that thrives on situation rather than micro-moment. The creators who built audiences in those spaces already understand long-form thinking.
The cultural moment we're in is one where every media company wants to own the relationship between creator and audience. Tubi sees a chance to let creators keep building that relationship on a bigger screen, with bigger budgets, in a format that might stick around longer than a viral clip. Whether the creators actually want that responsibility, or whether their audiences will follow them there, remains the question nobody's asking yet.