Fox Targets Football Season for Launch of New Streaming Service

Fox is aiming to launch its new streaming service by the start of the NFL and college football seasons later this year, CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on Monday.

Murdoch, speaking at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in San Francisco, said “the aspiration” is for the unnamed streaming service to hit the “mid-single digit millions of subscribers range.”

His comments come a month after Fox announced it would be launching a new subscription-based streaming service by the end of 2025. Murdoch, on the company’s most recent earnings call, said the service will be priced “relatively low” and offer “existing content and existing brands.” The yet-to-be-named platform will provide a “holistic” offering of Fox programming, he added, including sports, TV shows and news.

Fox’s jump into the crowded SVOD space comes after the company — as well as partners Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery — ditched plans for a sports streamings service named Venu earlier this year.

In related news, Murdoch said Fox Nation has 2 to 2.5 million subscribers. Murdoch pointed to shows from Kevin Costner and Martin Scorsese — which TheWrap recently covered as part of Fox Nation’s plan to “infiltrate” Hollywood — as hits for the service.

Moving forward, Murdoch said there is a good opportunity for Tubi, the free streaming service owned by Fox, to “deepen” its relationship with the NFL, after it helped Fox hit a record number of viewers during the Super Bowl. He said Tubi plans on adding more NFL games in the future.

As for the $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit Fox faces from Smartmatic, Murdoch said he expects to go to trial at the end of 2025.

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