Fox Corp.

Fox won the right to buy an 18.6% stake in sports betting company FanDuel Group from its parent company Flutter, but not at the valuation, according to a ruling Friday from a New York arbitrator. Should Fox exercise its option to take the stake, it would be at a price of at least $3.72 billion.

Fox Corp. said it selected FreeWheel, Comcast’s ad tech company, to manage its television advertising inventory across its OneFox portfolio. The portfolio includes Fox’s entertainment, sports, streaming and news channels and programming.

CFO Steve Tomsic: “Our television stations had a record September quarter for political advertising revenues, while the Fox Network benefitted from continued strength in pricing.” And CEO Lachlan Murdoch is bullish looking ahead: “With a week still to go before Election Day, we have already beat our fiscal year 2021 record at the local stations, excluding the Georgia run-offs.”

Fox Corp. rode a surge in political ad spending and continued growth in streaming in its fiscal first quarter, posting financial results above Wall Street analysts’ expectations. Adjusted net income came in at $1.21 per share, up a dime from the year-ago quarter and well ahead of analysts’ consensus forecast for $1.12. Total revenue of $3.19 billion, up 5% from a year ago, also cleared the bar. Fox credited a surge in political advertising and the continued growth of Tubi, its ad-supported streaming service.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is exploring a re-combination of the family’s Fox Corp. and News Corp., which split into two separate companies nearly a decade ago. The boards of directors of both have set up committees to examine the possibility. News Corp. said Friday afternoon that its board, at the request of Rupert Murdoch and the Murdoch Family Trust, has formed a special committee “composed of independent and disinterested members of the board” to begin exploring a combination.

The partnership will cover the Fox portfolio, leveraging InnovidXP for measurement of linear and streaming.

Fox Corp. Chief Financial Officer Steve Tomsic said traditional linear television like broadcast and cable services still have a lot of life left in them, downplaying comments made by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who claimed the end of linear television was near.

CEO Lachlan Murdoch said today: “We’re currently seeing a return to growth in the auto category for the first time in a couple of years. This stability of the base market provides a strong foundation for the upcoming political cycle, where the outlook is remarkably strong.”

Executives from Fox Corp., Sinclair, and E.W. Scripps will discuss how media companies are revamping their technology and building new workflows as a hedge against cybersecurity threats in a panel at TVNewsCheck’s Cybersecurity for Broadcasters Retreat at the NAB New York Show on Oct. 18. Register here.

The agreement includes the continued distribution of the full portfolio of Fox brands including Fox News Media, Fox Sports, Fox Network and local Fox O&Os. Fox Weather will also be added to the Fios TV lineup, and Tubi will be included in both Fios TV set top boxes, as well as on many other platforms.

Fox Corp. CTO and President of Digital Paul Cheesbrough and Jeff Dow, its EVP, media & broadcast operations, offered a rare glimpse into how the company built a new cloud-centric architecture that feeds all of its broadcast and digital streams in a TVNewsCheck webinar last week.

The media mogul’s fourth divorce is unlikely to change the ownership structure of Murdoch’s empire, but it could reverberate through companies such as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

A Delaware judge on Tuesday rejected a motion by the parent of Fox News Channel to dismiss Dominion Voting Systems Inc.’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit over the network’s 2020 presidential election coverage. Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, who last December said Dominion could sue Fox News Channel, said the voting machine company can also sue Fox Corp. on a theory it was directly liable for statements on the network.

Executives from Fox Corp. will share insights from building a pioneering new cloud-native operations center in Tempe, Ariz., dubbed the Gryphon Project, and where it sits in a larger reinvention of the technology powering Fox’s broadcast and digital businesses in a TVNewsCheck Working Lunch webinar on July 12 at 1 p.m. ET. Register here.

Fox Corp. is in the early stages of expanding into lifestyle verticals across categories like outdoors, home and books, CEO Lachlan Murdoch says. The hope is that new lifestyle verticals, in addition to streaming, sports betting and web3 projects, will “give us our growth going forward,” Murdoch said. The push into lifestyle content builds on the success of Fox News Media’s subscription streaming service, Fox Nation, which launched in 2018 as Fox News’ first big foray into softer content.

The NFL legend will join Fox Sports whenever he hangs up his cleats. The news came during the company’s call with analysts to report another growth quarter the company, with total revenues up 7% to $3.2 billion. Ad revenue grew 9% overall to $1.3 billion, led by stronger pricing and higher ratings at Fox News and continued growth at Tubi, the company’s ad-supported streaming service.

The media analysts at MoffettNathanson want you to know that Fox shares are terribly undervalued. So if you lost a lot of money on Netflix…

The News Corp. co-chair, Rupert’s eldest son, left no mystery about his conservative politics in a fiery speech.

Fox Corp. wants Madison Avenue to understand that Fox News doesn’t always mean hard-news content. As the company’s biggest generator of operating profit expands into weather news and lifestyle shows, its ad-tech division is offering new tools aimed at helping advertisers find the exact types of digital content they want to support. Fox Corp. today unveiled a proprietary technology it calls Atlas to a group of advertisers meeting in Los Angeles, with a mission to help them match commercials with specific types of digital programming.

Fox Corp.’s plan to be a major player in sports betting has hit a snag with the fledgling sports betting site Fox Bet struggling and the company failing to resolve ongoing ownership issues with its partner Flutter Entertainment. The 3-year-old site, heavily promoted on Fox TV networks, is only available in four states, and Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said he’s unhappy with the progress.

Executives from Fox Corp., CBS Television Stations, Hearst and Vizrt told a TVNewsCheck webinar last week the ongoing transition to IP networking and public cloud technology is driving staffers in both engineering and IT to learn new skills.

Broadcasters widely increased their political revenue guidance for 2022 following an earnings season in which spot saw continued growth across categories except for the still-beleaguered automotive industry.

advertising, political advertising, quarterly earnings analysis

Ad revenues for the TV segment rose 6% to $649 million, while the cable nets rose 3% to $454 million. Affiliate revenues (retrans and reverse comp) grew 10% to $649 million for TV and affiliate fees rose 12% to $454 million for cable.

Fox’s revenue rose 9% from the same quarter last year, with cable, broadcast and Tubi all pitching in. Advertising revenue was up 6% to $2.4 billion and affiliate revenues increased 11% to nearly $1.7 billion. Unfortunately, expenses climbed as well. With some key adjustments, excluding the losses from its affiliates, Fox was able to report adjusted earnings per share of 13 cents and adjusted net income of $77 million.

Executives from Fox Corp., Tegna, Sinclair and Bitcentral at least week’s NewsTECHForum said the cloud has become an increasingly important tool for business recovery, even with the caveat that the public cloud can be subject to its own outages.

Netflix has lost an appeal of a 2019 ruling that ordered the streaming service to stop poaching employees from Fox. The streaming service has been battling Fox since 2016 over the practice of locking midlevel executives into fixed-term contracts. Netflix has argued that Fox’s contracts are illegal under California law, and that they unfairly restrict employee mobility. Netflix’s argument, had it succeeded, could have upended how Hollywood studios do business.

Executives from Fox Corp., Sinclair, Tegna and Bitcentral will chart the trajectory of more and more news operations into the cloud or a hybrid cloud environment at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum on Dec. 14, presented in-person at the New York Hilton and virtually as well. Register here.

Said CFO Steve Tomsic: “At the Fox Television Stations we continued to observe a meaningful rebound in the base market, with our core ad revenue up high single-digits, which partially offset the absence of historic political advertising revenues that we experienced last year.”

Fox Corp. posted a strong September quarter Wednesday afternoon, including a 12% pop in sales to $3.05 billion, beating Wall Street forecasts and fueled by a 17% uptick in ad revenue, citing continued growth at Tubi, the return of a full schedule of live events at Fox Sports and more scripted programming at Fox Entertainment — all versus last year when the industry was still staggering under COVID.

It’s just possible that Rupert Murdoch and his boutique media joint might be onto something that other media companies should be thoroughly investigating, too.

Executive Chairman-CEO Lachlan Murdoch hailed an “absolutely historic” upfront for the Fox Network and its cable and digital siblings, and then focused on the ad rebound already underway. “All of our categories are up very strongly, with the exception of two, which are auto and telecom,” he noted, referring to the company’s local station business.

Lachlan Murdoch has dug into the billion dollar revenues of his company, telling Fox Corp. employees they’re all receiving a bonus of $2,000 or more. In a note to staff, the CEO of Fox Corp., which includes Fox News and Fox Sports, announced that all staff across the company will receive the bonus.