No one is Hubbling – service goes into maintenance mode

It appears that no one is Hubbling despite an uber-expensive $200 million marketing campaign featuring Hamish and Andy. Hubbl is a costly flop foisted onto about 100,000 Australians who drank the Kool-Aid.

When CyberShack first saw Hubbl in October 2023, we were not impressed. Foxtel Hubbl – search saviour or sinner? (AV updated TV Spyware guide). Hubbl took umbrage with our suggestion that it was nothing more than another generic streaming puck with the sole purpose of helping Foxtel sidestep the traditional ratings system and keep its users’ data for its own purposes.

We followed that up with an overview of the Hubbl puck and its Hubbl Glass TV Foxtel Hubbl update – the black box and TV(AV).

We bought a Hubbl puck and, after extensive testing decided that it was not worth the effort. The package aggregation was extremely limited, and instead wrote Telstra TV users – your best replacement is… Fetch!

Bottom line is no one is Hubbling

Foxtel CEO Patrick Delany has confirmed to AFR that the Hubbl puck and TV were in ‘maintenance mode’. Existing customers will receive technical assistance, but he cannot guarantee the platform’s survival beyond the next year. Some 35 Hubbl staff are gone.

There is much speculation over sales numbers. Delany says more than 100,000 units were sold, but our retail spies said there was a very high return rate. The pick up was Google TV streaming devices and Fetch Mini G5 – loads of untapped potential (AV review).

Then there were tens of thousands of giveaways, $50 cashbacks and online bucket shop sales at any price.

Foxtel was also sold to DANZ in April 2025, and that may be why it’s unwilling to support a competitor, Sky UK, which developed Hubbl for Foxtel.

 Foxtel has also said that its IQ4 and IQ5 set-top boxes are the end of the line – no IQ6 is coming. It makes economic sense to develop a fully featured smart TV app instead of relying on outmoded hardware, although the App won’t support hard disk recording.