A recent reader survey put The Roku Channel at the front of the free ad-supported streaming field, with Pluto TV and Tubi close enough behind to keep the race tight. Cord Cutters News asked more than 1,000 readers which service they liked best, and The Roku Channel came out first with 31.1 percent.
That result is why Pluto TV is drawing attention now. It sits in second place at 24.2 percent, with Tubi just behind at 23.8 percent, while 11.4 percent said they do not use any free ad-supported services and all others together took only 0.5 percent. For anyone following Pluto TV, the gap is small enough to matter and large enough to show that The Roku Channel still held a clear edge in this sample.
The three services also carry very different histories. The Roku Channel launched in September 2017 and built its catalog through licensing deals with Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., MGM, Lionsgate, Disney and Paramount Pictures. Pluto TV, by contrast, was founded in Los Angeles in 2013 by Tom Ryan, Ilya Pozin and Nick Grouf, went live with a public beta in early 2014 and was later acquired by Viacom in 2019 for approximately 340 million dollars.
Tubi entered the market in April 2014 after being founded in San Francisco, and Fox Corporation acquired it in 2020 for roughly 440 million dollars. That background helps explain why the survey matters beyond a simple popularity list: these services have grown into major free ad-supported streaming platforms, but the vote still came down to a few percentage points. Pluto TV’s showing was strong, yet the survey suggests it remains in a crowded chase rather than in command.
What the survey does not answer is why The Roku Channel finished ahead. The rankings show reader preference, not the features that drove it, and that leaves the next test to the services themselves: whether they can hold those viewers when the choice is no longer a survey response but the next screen a user opens.
