Fox Readies DTC Streaming Options for News, Sports

The Fox Corporation is one of the most well-known (and controversial) legacy media firms in the industry, and though its free streaming platform Tubi is one of the most popular ad-supported direct-to-consumer (DTC) services on the market, the company doesn’t have an entertainment-specific subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service; news and lifestyle streamer Fox Nation is the only subscription service under Fox’s corporate umbrella.

The Streamer reports one of the biggest reasons for this is that Fox sold most of its entertainment assets to Disney in 2019. Since then, the company has essentially had to build a programming library from scratch, though its news and sports segments have continued to drive viewers to the network.

During Fox’s conference call to discuss its quarterly earnings report with Wall Street analysts on Tuesday, CEO Lachlan Murdoch said that his company was ready to ramp up its DTC offerings when the time was right, but that its linear channels on multi-channel video-programming distributors (MVPDs) — also known as cable and satellite providers — and virtual MVPDs (vMVPDs) — live TV streaming services like DIRECTV STREAM — were still pulling in too much revenue to switch over now.

“What we plan to do with news and sport going forward in terms of any sort of a direct-to-consumer or alternative kind of distribution strategy, as I think we’ve said before, we’re ready to go,” Murdoch said. “We have the technology in place. I think we have the teams and people in place to go DTC when we deem that necessary or prudent.”

The CEO did not put any kind of timeline on when users could expect Fox to ramp up its news and sports streaming offerings, but he stressed that those would be key factors in any future DTC distribution.

“We see DTC in the future, and it will come eventually as just one component of a broader distribution strategy, but it’s — certainly across any of those platforms or technologies it’s hard to see not having our sports and our news on those platforms,” Murdoch explained.