Will Fox's Roku Buy Help Lachlan Murdoch Leapfrog Rivals in Streaming Wars?
has for years downplayed the appeal of streaming when it came to a company like his Fox Corp., which remains one of the biggest suppliers of sports, news and entertainment via the industry’s traditional content “pipes” of broadcast and cable TV.
Fox in the past poked fun at rivals who asked consumers to pay more money to gain access to streaming favorites, noting that its Tubi service was free. And it tried to strike a tighter connection with advertisers by noting that Fox still liked supporting content with commercials, rather than removing ads away from the viewing experience.
, its new subscription streaming service aimed at cord cutters, Murdoch forbid the company from promoting the outlet to traditional TV audiences, a bid to ensure the new platform wouldn’t upset its relationships with cable and video distributors. Murdoch may have offered only an exploratory handshake to streaming before, but he is now giving the medium a big bear hug.in a deal that will transform the company, one of the smaller players in media since it unloaded its studio assets and a good chunk of its cable portfolioThe pact, Murdoch said Monday during a call with investors, “creates a company better positioned for the next decade of video than either of us would be alone.
”that has increasingly turned to streaming, no matter Murdoch’s past ambivalence. The new tie-up will provide Fox “with a strategic TV operating system while likely being able to get more leverage on the advertising business,” said the research firm William Blair in a note to investors Monday.in the industry’s annual “upfront” market, when big U.S. media companies try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of programming, and investing it in streaming video.
“At a high level, the company would become an even bigger player in the US advertising industry, with $9 billion of pro forma advertising revenue, or around 14% of all spending on US television,” according to a research note from Madison & Wall, a consultancy, issued Monday. “In streaming, the transaction would combine Fox’s Tubi service with the Roku Channel and, by our estimates, create a platform that would represent roughly 16% of U.S. streaming advertising revenue.
” Acquiring Roku, however, will put Fox in an even bigger position in comparison with rivals. Fox has been “the only major broadcast network without a scaled streaming anchor to match Disney+, Peacock, or Paramount+,” Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at Forrester.
“Roku brings scale, data, and its operating system and Fox brings premium live sports and news, creating a closed-loop connected TV advertising engine. ” Fox becomes a distributor as well as a content provider. Companies like Amazon and Paramount will need to strike deals with Fox every few years to keep their content flowing on Roku.
When asked if Fox is prepared to deal from a different side of the table, Murdoch reminded analysts Monday that “this is not our first rodeo” when it comes to distribution. Fox previously operated the Sky satellite service before selling it to Comcast in 2018. Roku could even lend Fox some new heft as it deals with sports leagues for top rights to games from the NFL and Major League Baseball.
These leagues are eager to get their matches to viewers in new media outlets, and Roku would potentially expand the reach and audience for Fox’s World Series telecast and Sunday afternoon football games. The NFL is already interested in examining the potential toDuring Monday’s call, Murdoch said sports rights were not part of the impetus to acquire Roku, and did not see the deal causing any change to the distribution of sports across broadcast, cable and Fox One.
Could the deal spur Fox to examine what is becoming an unwieldy streaming portfolio? Fox already operates Tubi, the free, ad-supported service; Fox Nation, a subscription service aimed at fans of Fox News Channel; and Fox One, the new subscription outlet that has gained tractionMurdoch said Tubi and Roku have only about a one-third overlap in audiences.
“They are not identical services,” he said, with Tubi getting a lot of its audience on platforms other than Roku. Whatever the ramifications of the deal to the company’s internal workings, Murdoch clearly hopes buying Roku makes Fox more of a force in the media sector. The deal, he said, “will help define the future of television.
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