Anjali Sud

Company: TubiTitle: Chief Executive OfficerIndustry: Media and EntertainmentNotable in 2024: Sud, in her first full year as CEO, grew Tubi's audience to more than 80 million monthly active users in the United States, launched the service in the UK, and became the No. 1 ad-supported streaming service in Canada.

If you watched the recent NFL Super Bowl — and didn't watch it through a cable, satellite or internet TV subscription, or a now "old school" digital antenna — the chances are you watched the big game on Tubi, the free, ad-supported streaming app.

But what you didn't see behind the scenes was the ambitious, young female CEO who has run of show at the booming streaming service.

Anjali Sud, the former CEO of streaming video platform Vimeo — a post she rose to at the age of 33 and where Sud oversaw one of the many spinoff IPOs from Barry Diller's IAC media conglomerate in 2022 — made the jump to Tubi in September 2023. After heading Vimeo for six years, Sud said in a podcast appearance that she was ready for a new challenge after helping Vimeo achieve profitability and go public.

Tubi, founded as a free television and movie streaming service in 2014 — and now a division of Fox Corporation, which acquired Tubi in 2020 for roughly $440 million — offers over 275,000 television episodes and movies, and it has become the most-watched free streaming service. Its Super Bowl LIX stream broke a streaming record.

While Tubi has been growing impressively for a few years, this year's Super Bowl was a major moment in its importance within a streaming industry story that continues to take more share of eyeballs. Over 12 trillion minutes were streamed in 2024, which equates to roughly 8.4 billion days, according to Nielsen. And although paid streaming service subscriber tiers remain where a lot of the action is, providing free streaming services to audiences with ads is becoming a must.

Tubi's business model has never changed.

"100 percent ad-supported and free for viewers, so there's no subscription fees. There's no tiers, no packages, and no add-ons," Sud told The Verge.

Sud has always had the entrepreneurial bug and a belief in the classic American Dream. Her parents were Indian immigrants, and growing up in Flint, Michigan, she carries with her what they sacrificed to give her better opportunities. She also learned firsthand how to be an entrepreneur from her father, who runs a plastics recycling plant in Flint. "My earliest memories as a kid are being on the plant floor, watching my dad take so much pride in being able to create blue-collar jobs in our town at a time when that was really needed. So that was the first part of forming my desire for what I wanted to do," she told "Work Friends," a content series produced by women's clothing brand Argent.

She also saw how a one-time business epicenter could be destroyed by rapid changes in the global economy and technology. That's a prescient warning for her current industry focus. "You've got cable and traditional television facing considerable headwinds," she told Argent. "You have the traditional Hollywood ecosystem that is clearly being challenged, from strikes to layoffs. This is an industry that's going to go through real evolution and structural change."

As of January, Tubi's audience had grown to over 97 million active users and boasted more than 10 billion hours of streamed content. Abroad, Tubi is also growing its footprint, launching in the United Kingdom and becoming the No. 1 ad-supported service in Canada.

Now Tubi is getting more attention from the media empire upstairs. "Tubi went from virtually nothing four years ago to a meaningful number for us," Fox CFO Steve Tomsic said on an earnings call last November.

It is not profitable yet, and the growth started before Sud's arrival. As far back as 2022, Tubi's revenue surpassed the advertising revenue generated by Fox Entertainment for the first time. The following year, Tubi for the first time earned a mention in "The Gauge," Nielsen's monthly snapshot of total TV and streaming viewership, not including mobile or desktop viewing.

Tubi's audience, 77% of which doesn't have cable TV, skews toward millennials, Gen Z and females, with more than 34% between the ages 18 and 34. That's a demographic that Sud views as an advantage as she takes the company into the future. "We see ourselves as free entertainment for the cordless generation. And we're sort of designing our content, our brand, our product to really serve that group. And I'm super excited and energized about the future of entertainment," she said on the Billion Dollar Moves podcast.

Already in 2025, Tubi announced a deal with one of the marquee entertainment partners in the world of streaming, a partnership with the WWE, to create a new exclusive show, WWE EVOLVE.

Whatever comes next, Sud approaches it with an air of the undaunted. "I am unapologetic about being ambitious and impatient because I don't think it's at odds with what helps make a business great," she told Argent.