Fubo unveiled a major upgrade to its iOS and Android apps on April 9, 2026, using the company's proprietary artificial intelligence technology to overhaul how sports fans consume live content away from home. The announcement, made from New York by FuboTV Inc. (NYSE: FUBO), marks a deliberate shift in the platform's product strategy - from treating the phone as a secondary screen to positioning it as a primary destination for live sports and news consumption.

The upgraded apps introduce live video in home-screen carousels, AI-powered vertical video for Team Channels, expanded Game Alerts that surface key plays in real time, and breaking news push notifications linked directly to live coverage. Each feature leans on Fubo's internally developed AI models rather than third-party tools, a detail the company underscored throughout the announcement.

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Background: a platform shaped by acquisition and consolidation

Fubo's mobile upgrade arrives at a particular moment in the company's history. The platform completed its merger with Disney's Hulu + Live TV on October 29, 2025, creating what the two companies described as the sixth-largest pay TV provider in the United States with nearly 6 million subscribers in North America. Disney holds approximately 70% interest in the combined entity, with existing Fubo shareholders retaining approximately 30%.

The merger transformed a company that had positioned itself as an independent, sports-first challenger - one that had filed an antitrust lawsuit against Disney, Fox Corporation, and Warner Bros. Discovery over their proposed Venu Sports joint venture - into a Disney affiliate. Following a January 6, 2025 settlement, Fubo received a $220 million one-time payment and a carriage agreement for Disney's channel suite. That legal arc, from challenger to subsidiary, forms the backdrop against which this product announcement lands.

Since the merger closed, the company has moved systematically to extract synergies. Fubo Sports Network began streaming on Hulu + Live TV's $89.99 plan in February 2026, delivering approximately 1,200 hours of live content annually. In March 2026, Fubo struck a carriage deal with Spectrum SportsNet LA, bringing more than 140 Los Angeles Dodgers regular season games to subscribers within that network's geographic footprint - the first time the platform had ever carried Dodgers coverage. Earlier, the Fubo Channel Store launched on November 5, 2025, offering standalone premium plans from MGM+, Starz, Paramount+ with Showtime, DAZN One, Hallmark+, and multiple regional sports networks without requiring a base Fubo subscription.

The mobile app overhaul announced April 9 fits into this broader sequence. Having addressed content aggregation, distribution partnerships, and standalone streaming, the company is now turning attention to the experience layer - specifically, what the phone does for a fan who is not sitting in front of a television.

Live video on the home screen

The most visible change in the updated apps is the introduction of live video in carousels directly on the home screen. Previously, the home screen used static images to represent available content. Under the new design, in-line video plays automatically within the carousel as soon as the app opens, without requiring any navigation.

According to Fubo, the goal is to reduce the number of steps between opening the app and watching a game. By showing live video immediately rather than thumbnails or team logos, the home screen itself becomes a viewing surface rather than a menu. The company also describes the dynamic home screen as a "destination within the Fubo app" - a phrase that suggests the carousel is intended to keep users engaged even during brief phone checks rather than serving only as a launch point for longer viewing sessions.

The technical implementation relies on Fubo's proprietary AI, which selects which live moment to display in the carousel at any given time. Rather than showing a generic team logo or a static programme image, the AI identifies a relevant moment from the current broadcast and surfaces it as the carousel's visual. This means the same home screen can display different content for different users, depending on which teams or leagues they follow.

Team Channels and vertical video

Team Channels is an existing Fubo feature that allows users who have DVR'd coverage of their favourite teams to access team-based playlists. These playlists comprise bite-sized clips of game coverage and news, assembled automatically rather than manually curated. The April 9 update expands the feature in two directions.

First, it adds more filters. Users can now sort Team Channels content by league as well as by team, and the system covers key sports moments more broadly - not just the specific games a user has recorded, but significant plays across the sport. Second, and structurally more significant, Team Channels is gaining vertical (portrait) video support, aligning with how most people hold their phones when browsing. This specific feature was listed in the announcement as launching "in the coming weeks" rather than being immediately available at launch.

The vertical video implementation uses Fubo's proprietary AI models to reframe the original broadcast footage. Live sports video is produced in landscape (widescreen) format for television. Adapting that content for a portrait orientation on a phone screen requires deciding which portion of the frame to show - a goalkeeper, a runner rounding third base, a basketball player at the free-throw line. According to the announcement, Fubo's AI models zoom into what the system identifies as the most critical areas of the video to create the portrait experience, rather than simply cropping to the centre of the frame.

This is a technically non-trivial problem. Sports broadcasts involve rapid, unpredictable camera movements, zooms, and cuts. Automated reframing must track action across these transitions without producing disorienting results. The approach Fubo describes - AI-driven zoom selection targeting critical areas - mirrors techniques used by social video platforms that have encountered the same landscape-to-portrait challenge for highlights and short-form sports clips.

Game Alerts with embedded play access

Fubo's personalised Game Alerts system, which sends push notifications when a subscriber's favourite teams are playing, has been extended to include key play moments. According to the announcement, pro baseball fans can now receive alerts specifically about the biggest plays during a game - not just a general notification that a game has started or is in progress.

The example provided in the announcement is specific: if a favourite team hits a home run in the top of the 7th inning to take the lead, Fubo sends a push notification about that moment. A single tap on the notification takes the user directly to that home run clip within the app. There is no additional navigation required. The clip surfaces immediately on tap.

This design pattern - notification to specific moment with one interaction - reflects how sports fans actually use their phones during a game they are not watching. A fan away from the television might check a score, receive an alert about a significant play, and want to see the play itself within seconds, before the moment loses its urgency. The feature is launching for baseball initially, suggesting the company plans to expand it to other sports in subsequent updates.

The AI component here operates upstream of the notification itself. Fubo's system must identify, in real time, which moments within a broadcast qualify as significant enough to warrant an alert. That classification - a home run to take the lead in the 7th qualifies; a routine ground-out does not - is what the company's AI models are performing as the game unfolds.

Breaking news alerts linked to live coverage

The final feature in the April 9 announcement extends the same tap-to-watch logic from sports to news. According to Fubo, users can receive breaking news text alerts while away from a screen and, with one tap on the notification, begin watching live news coverage immediately.

This connects two functions that are currently separated on most devices: the alert that something is happening, and the means to watch it happen. Whether the underlying AI is performing any editorial judgment about what constitutes breaking news warranting an alert - or whether that threshold is set by the news channels themselves - was not detailed in the announcement.

What Isaac Josephson said

According to the announcement, Isaac Josephson, senior vice president of product management at Fubo, described the mobile push as a deliberate strategic extension rather than an incremental feature release. "At Fubo, we've already mastered the living room. Now, we're conquering the on-the-go space," Josephson stated. He added: "By leveraging our proprietary AI at scale, we're transforming the Fubo mobile app from a simple streaming tool into a high-value, personalized, content engine."

The language about "mastering the living room" is a reference to Fubo's established position in connected television. The company was the first virtual multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) to launch 4K streaming and MultiView functionality. Those product milestones, achieved before the Disney merger, positioned Fubo as technically differentiated in the living room streaming market.

The mobile app overhaul is an attempt to claim equivalent standing on a second screen - one with different usage patterns, different interface constraints (portrait orientation, touch navigation, smaller display area, intermittent attention), and different competitive dynamics.

Context for the marketing and advertising community

For advertisers and media buyers, the April 9 announcement has practical implications that extend beyond product features. Fubo sits within Disney's advertising infrastructure. The company is projecting a migration of Fubo's ad sales to the Disney Ad Server, a move that would consolidate the platform's sports-first audience within Disney's programmatic stack. That combined platform reported 122 million ad-supported streaming subscribers as of early 2026.

The mobile features announced April 9 create new ad surface areas. Live video carousels on the home screen represent inventory that did not exist in static form. Vertical video for Team Channels opens a format that is standard on social platforms but relatively rare in traditional streaming environments. Game Alert notifications with embedded clips create a moment-specific, high-attention context - precisely the kind of placement that commands premium rates in live sports advertising.

Fubo introduced pause ads, interactive ads, and Marquee placements in May 2024, demonstrating a pattern of packaging product innovations as advertising opportunities. The home-screen carousel announced April 9 follows the same structural logic as the Marquee product - a branded, high-visibility placement on the first surface a user encounters when opening the app.

Magnite rolled out pause ads across Fubo in August 2025, integrating Fubo's inventory into a sell-side infrastructure that also covers DIRECTV and DISH Media. That relationship means demand-side platforms can already access Fubo's CTV inventory through established programmatic channels. Mobile inventory, by contrast, operates within a different measurement and attribution environment - one where cross-device matching between CTV exposure and mobile actions remains technically challenging across the industry.

PubMatic's AI-powered Live Sports Marketplace, launched in July 2025, included Fubo as one of its publisher partners alongside MLB, DirecTV, Spectrum Reach, and Roku. That marketplace enables advertisers to target specific game moments - home runs, touchdowns, game-changing plays - in real time across streaming inventory. The Game Alerts feature Fubo announced April 9 surfaces those same moments to subscribers as notifications. The alignment between what advertisers want to target (high-impact plays) and what Fubo is now surfacing to users (notifications about high-impact plays with embedded video) is not coincidental.

Company profile at the time of announcement

FuboTV Inc. identifies itself as a consumer-first live TV streaming company with operations across the United States, Canada, and Spain, and subsidiary Molotov in France. According to UBS estimates cited in the announcement, the company is the sixth-largest pay TV provider in the United States. Fast Company ranked it among its Most Innovative Companies for 2026. The Financial Times named it among The Americas' Fastest-Growing Companies in both 2025 and 2026. The company owns Hulu + Live TV (entertainment), Fubo (sports), and Molotov (entertainment and sports), and is an affiliate of The Walt Disney Company.

Fubo reported its first quarter of positive Adjusted EBITDA in Q2 2025, at a minimum of $20 million, a milestone after years of losses. The company has since guided to $80-$100 million Adjusted EBITDA for the full fiscal year ending September 30, 2026, and has projected $300 million by 2028 - a target dependent on contractual wholesale fee step-ups from 95% in 2026 to 99% in 2028 under its commercial agreement with Hulu.

The mobile app upgrade was announced without financial guidance attached. No subscriber numbers specific to mobile usage, no app session data, and no advertising revenue figures tied to mobile inventory were disclosed alongside the April 9 announcement.

Timeline

Summary

Who: FuboTV Inc. (NYSE: FUBO), a Disney affiliate and the sixth-largest pay TV company in the United States by UBS estimates, operating the Fubo sports streaming platform.

What: A major upgrade to Fubo's iOS and Android mobile apps, introducing live video in home-screen carousels, expanded and vertical-format Team Channels powered by AI-driven reframing, moment-specific Game Alerts for baseball linked directly to play clips, and breaking news text alerts connected to live coverage - all built on Fubo's proprietary AI models.

When: Announced April 9, 2026, from New York, with the vertical video feature for Team Channels described as launching in the coming weeks.

Where: Available on iOS and Android devices globally, as part of Fubo's live TV streaming platform, which operates in the United States, Canada, and Spain, with subsidiary Molotov in France.

Why: The upgrade reflects a strategic effort to make the Fubo mobile app a primary destination for sports content consumption away from the television, rather than a secondary or utility screen. The company is extending the same AI and personalisation infrastructure it has built for living room CTV into the mobile environment, creating new advertising surfaces - live video carousels, vertical clips, moment-triggered alerts - that align with how live sports advertisers want to reach engaged audiences in real time.

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