ADE OSHINEYE: Hi, I'm Ade from Google Developer Relations.
And I'm here with Marios from Tubi.
MARIOS ASSIOTIS: Hi, I'm Marios, and I'm the CTO of Tubi.
I'm very happy to be here.
ADE OSHINEYE: Great.
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
MARIOS ASSIOTIS: Yeah.
I've been at Tubi for about 4 and 1/2 going into five years
now.
I run the engineering team there.
And I'm very, very, very passionate
about movies and TV shows.
ADE OSHINEYE: OK.
Can you tell me a little bit about Tubi?
MARIOS ASSIOTIS: Yeah.
So Tubi is a video on demand streaming service.
It is very much like, you may have heard Netflix or Hulu,
HBO, any one of those that are popping up these days.
The big difference is Tubi is 100% free.
We don't want your money.
We don't want your credit card.
You can use the Tubi app on any of the streaming devices
we support,-- and we pretty much support all of them--
and immediately start streaming a movie or a TV
show out of our library of 23,000.
ADE OSHINEYE: So, how has Tubi taken advantage of Android's 5G
APIs to bring to market a user-requested feature?
MARIOS ASSIOTIS: Before we jump into the Android APIs,
the way we do development at Tubi
is to start small and iterate.
So the first thing we did is consider the user request is--
I have a metered connection.
I'm on my phone.
I want to watch.
But I'm concerned that I'm going to get
all this additional charges.
So we introduce a data saver option.
That is, within the Tubi app that the users can [INAUDIBLE]..
And we did that in a controlled fashion.
We experimented.
And we saw that users were not only requesting it,
but they were actually using it.
So we saw users going to their settings, turning it on,
and we even saw increased engagement because of that.
Users would watch more.
And then we coordinated with our developer counterparts
at Google and introduces a lot of the 5G initiatives
that Google is doing, including an API where the data saver
option and the metered connection options
are available system-wide for all apps to use.
So we'll be releasing a new version that
makes extensive use of those.
ADE OSHINEYE: So looking into the future a little bit,
what sort of step changes do you expect to see
in consumer apps because of 5G?
MARIOS ASSIOTIS: Well, that's the big question.
And you know, what does 5G bring to the table?
So at the very obvious, it is a faster 4G with more bandwidth
and lower latency.
So immediate thing that you can think of is, you know,
I can watch a movie without being
concerned about buffering.
And it can be like a much smoother experience.
Then you can take it a step up and say, OK,
before we would be very conscious of the fact
that the user's on a mobile device
and would try to stream standard definition.
Speeds got faster, we started streaming higher HD content.
And then with 5G being more widespread,
that opens up possibilities, for example,
to be streaming even 4K content.
And that's just the things that we can imagine today
that are obvious.
Obviously, once you have the added bandwidth and the lower
latency and all the other benefits that 5G brings,
then you can start imagining new things
that you wouldn't have even thought of before.
ADE OSHINEYE: So how will 5G make your particular life
better?
MARIOS ASSIOTIS: Well, when developing, especially
for mobile, we have to remember that mobile phones were not
really designed for long sessions like movie watch.
It's not a coincidence that a lot of the most popular apps
on mobile center around short-form content,
because opening up that communication channel
to a tower and downloading data for long durations of time
in itself is not something mobile phone--
it's not the primary use case for a mobile phone.
Now, add that to the fact that the user can
hold their mobile phone and move around,
or maybe they're commuting, plus there's a battery life,
plus there's metered connections.
So all that stuff required tremendous engineering work
to be able to make that a smooth experience.
With 5G, that makes a lot of those things easier.
It brings extra bandwidth to the table.
Faster download speeds means you need
your radio open for less time, means potentially
improved battery life.
So now our engineering efforts can
go into improving the product itself, adding more features,
improving the personalization, a lot of things
that don't have to do with managing the logistics
around mobile communications.
ADE OSHINEYE: So how has 5G already made your life better?
MARIOS ASSIOTIS: It allows me to start thinking about, OK,
how can we use this?
So that makes my life better in that I allow myself
and my team to expand our horizons.
Personally, in areas where I live where 5G is available,
the increased bandwidth and faster download speeds
are obviously always welcome.
My personal favorite is a lower latency.
That's what I, as a user, personally
seem to benefit the most.
ADE OSHINEYE: OK.
And then, finally, which 5G device
are you looking forward to the most?
MARIOS ASSIOTIS: Personally, I am a Samsung user.
So I've been just following the release of the S line.
ADE OSHINEYE: OK.
Thank you very much.
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