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DENVER, Colo. — As Adam Lewinson would have it, the age of TV monoculture is now permanently in the rearview mirror.
“We’ve gone from the era of peak TV to the era of personalized TV,” Lewinson, Tubi chief content officer, told an audience at the StreamTV Show here last week. “People are watching what’s in their own fandom.”
Lewinson said viewers are now ranging between two poles: endless, primarily short-form user-generated content, and premium, paywalled long-form content from uber-streamers like Netflix. For Tubi, the goal is to sit squarely on the equator.
To do that, Lewinson said Tubi must hyper-scale to personalize. That means different content strategies for older versus younger viewers, for instance, while the brand looks to project a youthful, energetic vibe generally.
Reaching younger audiences is a steeper wall to scale given the non-TV platforms and technologies competing for their eyeballs — video games, texting and social media chief among them, he said. “That is a really hard target. It takes a refined approach.”
Capturing their attention is only the first step, Lewinson said. The next, harder one is converting that to habituation. That’s where Tubi draws on an old school playbook from linear TV scheduling.
“We still schedule, but it’s very different,” he said. Tubi’s scheduling is about cadence, knowing how often a young viewer is looking for something new and then being ready to offer it up when they are.
One potent offering is original movies for young adults, he said, which are both a