Tubi rolls out AI-powered programming recommendations

Not sure what to watch next? Talk to Tubi about it.

The free streaming service on Tuesday rolled out a ChatGPT-powered recommendation tool designed to help people surface recommendations using conversational language, not keywords. The tool, called RabbitAI and available for now as a beta test on Tubi’s iOS mobile app, is aimed at making it easier for users to find things to watch within its library of more than 200,000 shows and movies.

“You can ask it like you would a friend for a movie recommendation based on your mood, based on a topic or theme,” Blake Bassett, Tubi’s senior director of product, told Marketing Brew. “Our goal with this is obviously just to connect our viewers to content that they love.”

Bonus content

The tool is also designed to help Tubi better understand how its users watch, search for, and categorize programming. The streamer will log search prompts that come through RabbitAI and use that information to enrich content metadata to better inform how Tubi labels and surfaces programming to users, Bassett said.

The hope, he told us, is that over time those search prompts will help create meaningful “microgenres” on Tubi in the backend, categories like “slice-of-life anime,” “magical realism romance,” and “nonlinear war dramas,” for example. “Once we’re able to name something, we can then surface it to other people who we assess might be interested in it,” he said.

That categorization may have eventual implications for the advertising space, Bassett said. “You can imagine a world where we're able to surface relevant ads at the right time, at the right place, at the right setting within content with this greater content understanding,” he said.

AI AI, captain

Tubi’s AI-powered recommendation engine comes amid a huge surge in interest in generative AI tools. Amazon plans to invest up to $4 billion in the generative AI startup Anthropic, while social sites like Snapchat and Instagram are rolling out their own generative AI-powered chatbots and creation tools.

It also comes as there is growing concern, particularly among writers and actors, about generative AI’s implications in the entertainment space. Within the entertainment world, other streaming services are also investing in ways to make their platforms and sprawling libraries easier to navigate, but generative AI isn’t yet widely used.

Paramount-owned free streaming service Pluto TV recently rolled out a Home section designed to offer personalized and editorial programming recommendations, and most other streamers also dedicate resources to surfacing personalized recommendations to users.

Still, US consumers reported spending an average of 10-and-a-half minutes looking for something to watch, according to recent data from Nielsen.