Marquee at the main entrance to the FOX News Headquarters at NewsCorp Building in Manhattan.
Erik Mcgregor | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Fox Corp. will launch its direct-to-consumer streaming service, Fox One, on August 21, ahead of the NFL season, the company said Tuesday.
The new streaming service will cost $19.99 per month, and pay TV subscribers will receive access for free, said CEO Lachlan Murdoch during the company’s earnings call.
Fox One will host the entirety of the Fox TV portfolio — namely live sports such as NFL and MLB that appear on its broadcast network, as well as news programming from its Fox News and Fox Business cable TV networks.
Fox airs NFL games on Sundays during the regular season, which kicks off this year on September 4. The broadcast network also airs MLB postseason games, as well as college football, which also takes place in the fall.
However, the streaming service won’t offer any exclusive or original content, Murdoch said, adding that much of its costs will come from overhead, marketing and technology. This is in contrast to most of Fox’s competitors, which spend on additional sports rights and other content exclusive to streaming.
“It’s important to remember that our subscriber expectations or aspirations for Fox One are modest,” Murdoch said.
The company has been slower than its peers to jump into the streaming game. While it already has the Fox Nation service and Tubi, a free, ad-supported streaming app, it has yet to offer its full content slate in a direct-to-consumer offering.
Murdoch previously said the cost for the service would be “healthy and not a discounted price,” in an effort to avoid further disrupting the pay TV bundle, which has suffered continued customer losses.
Fox’s portfolio is mainly made up of sports and news content since it sold its entertainment assets to Disney in 2019. This has shielded Fox from some of the cord-cutting headwinds that have affected its media peers in recent years.
On Tuesday, Murdoch reiterated that the company will be looking to bundle Fox One with other streaming services. However, he said the company will be careful on that front, similarly so as not to cause further damage to the pay TV ecosystem.
He said Fox is mindful of two factors when it comes to bundling. First, to offer the consumer a convenient package of its content, and potentially valuable bundles. And second, to keep the service “very focused” on a “targeted audience” of those customers without pay TV subscriptions.
“Sometimes those two things conflict with each other. So we want to be very targeted, but we also want to make it easy for our consumers and our viewers to gain our content, whether it’s in conjunction with other services or not,” Murdoch said.
Earlier this year Murdoch told investors that Fox would launch its own answer to streaming after dropping its efforts for the joint sports streaming venture, Venu.
It will be joined by a new streaming offering from Disney’s ESPN in the coming weeks. While Disney already offers the ESPN+ streaming service, the company will launch a full-service ESPN direct-to-consumer product this fall. Disney earlier said that app will cost $29.99 a month. Disney reports its quarterly earnings on Wednesday.
On Tuesday Fox reported total revenue for its most recent quarter of $3.29 billion, up 6% from the same period last year.
While the advertising market has been weak for media companies, particularly for content outside of live sports, Fox reported its advertising revenue increased 7%. The company said this was primarily due to growth from Tubi as well as “stronger news ratings and pricing,” despite a drag from the absence of major soccer events as compared to the year-earlier quarter.
