Tubi’s library of streaming content is huge. And something impenetrable. You can watch its many always-on channels or watch something the service’s home screen recommends, but chances are you’ll spend too much time watching TV scrolling through the same endless rows of billboards until your eyes meet. Just like any other streaming service.
Or maybe, Tubi thinks, ChatGPT can help you find what you’re looking for a little faster. Tubi is launching a feature called Rabbit ai that lets you request content in any way you can imagine. Search for “movies like hidden figures,” and you will get up to 20 recommendations; search for “high school horror movies” and hopefully Rabbit ai will find what you’re looking for.
This isn’t a particularly new idea – some of the most useful ChatGPT plugins are ones like What to Watch and TMDB that access databases of movies and shows to help you get recommendations – but Tubi is among the first to create powered searches. by ai. directly on your platform. It will even suggest prompts to get users who may not know what they’re looking for to get started. ChatGPT has an occasional tendency to hallucinate and make up movies that don’t exist, but in this case Tubi can restrict the data to only relevant content. And if you make something up, it will be pretty obvious and pretty quick.
The fact that searches can be conversational also makes them unusually powerful, says Blake Bassett, senior product manager at Tubi. Instead of looking for a title, actor, or genre, you can start broad and figure things out over time. “I have a five-year-old who loves ancient Egypt,” Bassett says, so naturally he would look for shows about Egypt. “They were a lot of documentaries. So I thought, ‘What about children’s content or cartoons?'” That brought up a lot of things he didn’t recognize. “So I say, ‘I’m looking for something from a big studio or something that’s more professional,’” at which point the Bassetts evidently found something good to watch.
Getting all this data about what people search for and what they end up watching also helps Tubi discover more ways to categorize and filter its own library. “People are finding new ways to describe content through these prompts,” Bassett says, “and we can tag content and enrich our data on the backend… and show it to customers.” Ultimately, she believes that even users who don’t use Rabbit ai might find that Tubi’s recommendations are better and more personalized.
Bassett says there are basically three types of viewers. The first one knows exactly what he is looking for and keyword searching works well. The second has a vague idea: they want a cooking show or a stoner comedy but they don’t have a concrete plan in mind. “The third one is like, ‘I’m bored, I don’t care, I don’t want to spend mental energy finding something,'” Bassett says. Rabbit ai will be great for the second group and potentially great for the third if Tubi can tell you what you want to watch before you know it.
Rabbit ai is rolling out as a beta test in the Tubi app for about two-thirds of the platform’s users. If you are a paying ChatGPT customer, you can also get it as an add-on. Bassett says she’s looking to see if people actually use search and how long it takes them to get to something they really want to see. If it works, if ai can help solve the “scrolling so long that you eventually give up and look at your phone” problem, it could be the best discovery engine the streaming world has ever encountered.
