Oh, boy. Tubi absolutely dropped the ball during its livestream of the 2025 Super Bowl game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs. It wasn’t all bad for the Fox-owned streamer, though—at least the memes have been nothing short of spectacular.
In an effort to onboard users, Tubi was running a free livestream for the championship game—which ended in a victory for the Eagles—but things didn’t exactly go swimmingly, with multiple users reporting intermittent buffering issues and freezes.
Tubi’s Bumpy Super Bowl Viewing Experience
“Anyone else trying to watch the Super Bowl stream on Tubi? If so, is it stalling and buffering like crazy,” a viewer asked on social media. “If all the big-time sporting events are going to glitch like this because of the demand on free streaming service, they might as well give up on trying to do us this favor.”
“The picture quality on Tubi for the Super Bowl is really bad,” added another poster. “Everything is washed out and gray.”
Still, other viewers were handling the glitches with more levity, though:
Although a chunk of football fans were ruffled by the sub-par viewing experience, there was quite a bit of praise for Tubi’s decision to offer a free livestream, with fans crowning the streamer as “the real MVP.”
To Tubi’s credit, the buffering issues didn’t impact all users, it seems. “Tubi handled the Super Bowl with no issues whatsoever, but Netflix was shaking like a stripper with only Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson,” one user posted on X.
Tubi’s Super Bowl Ads Heavily Mocked
But as the adage goes, nothing in life comes for free. In the case of Tubi’s Super Bowl stream, the trade-off was ads—and fans had opinions on them.
“Okay, this Tubi commercial with the dude with the cowboy hat shaped head is one of the dumbest Super Bowl ads I’ve ever seen,” one person said.
In Tubi’s defense, highly anticipated sports events garner unusually large viewership, which puts tremendous amounts of stress on servers—hence the buffering issues. Not so long ago, Netflix suffered similar issues during the fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson.
Actually, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos spun the issues into a success story. “It’s a Super Bowl-like audience we were able to draw,” he said at the time, noting the fight was the “most streamed global sporting event ever.”
So despite some of the ridicule it received on social media, perhaps Tubi has something to be proud of, too. I guess what I’m saying is the streamer better hope that all PR is good PR—because it definitely got a lot of it during the Super Bowl.
