Fox Corp. Ahead of the NFL season, it will launch Fox One, a consumer streaming service, on August 21, the company said Tuesday.
The new streaming service costs $19.99 a month, and paid TV subscribers will receive free access, CEO Lachlan Murdoch said in a revenue call for the company.
Fox One hosts the entire Fox TV portfolio: live sports such as the NFL and MLB that appear on its broadcast network, as well as news programming for the Fox News and Fox Business Cable TV networks.
Fox will air NFL games on Sunday during the regular season, which begins on September 4th this year. The Broadcast Network will also broadcast MLB postseason games and college football, which will be held in the fall.
However, streaming services do not provide exclusive or original content, Murdoch said, adding that much of the cost comes from overhead, marketing and technology. This contrasts with most of Fox’s competitors, spending on additional sports rights and other content dedicated to streaming.
“It’s important to remember that our subscriber expectations and Fox’s expectations are modest,” Murdoch said.
The company was slower to jump into streaming games than its peers. Fox Nation Service and Tubi already feature free, ad-supported streaming apps, but they still don’t offer a full content slate with their consumer offering.
Murdoch previously said the cost of the service is “healthy, not a discounted price” and “not a discounted price” to avoid further disruption in pay TV bundles where customer losses continue.
Fox’s portfolio has been made up primarily of sports and news content since its sale of entertainment assets to Disney in 2019. This protects Fox from some of the cordcut headwinds that have affected media peers in recent years.
On Tuesday, Murdoch repeated that the company would consider bundle Fox with other streaming services. But he said the company would be careful on its frontline, similarly, not to cause any further damage to the pay television ecosystem.
He said Fox is paying attention to two factors when it comes to bundling. First, it provides consumers with convenient packages of content and potentially valuable bundles. Second, to “highly focus” the service on those customers’ “target audiences” without paying TV subscriptions.
“These two things can contradict each other, so we want to be highly targeted, but we want to make it easy for consumers and viewers to capture content, whether they are in conjunction with other services,” Murdoch said.
Earlier this year, Murdoch told investors that Fox will begin its own answer to streaming after dropping its efforts for Venu, a co-sports streaming venture.
It is combined by offering new streaming from Disney ESPN in the coming weeks. Disney already offers ESPN+ streaming services, but the company will launch full-service ESPN direct consumer products this fall. Disney previously said the app costs $29.99 a month. Disney reported quarterly revenue on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, FOX increased its gross revenue for the most recent quarter to $32.9 billion, up 6% from the same period last year.
Although the advertising market is weak for media companies, particularly for content outside of live sports, Fox reported an ad revenue growth of 7%. The company said this was mainly due to growth from Tubi and “stronger news ratings and pricing.”
