Baseball advertising appears to have pivoted from a months-long slump to hitting above average. Fox Corp. has sold more than 90% of its ad inventory in its share of games in Major League Baseball’s pandemic-truncated 2020 season, as well as all the ad berths in its planned broadcast of four games slated to air this Saturday on Fox Broadcasting and Fox Sports 1. Meanwhile, Home Team Sports, the Fox-owned unit that sells ad time on 44 regional sports networks, is trying to accommodate a new rush of advertisers trying to get time in local broadcasts.
Vince McMahon’s second try at the XFL announced its eight team names and logos on Wednesday. The rebooted league, which had an ill-fated attempt that lasted just one season in 2001, will begin play next February on the weekend following Super Bowl LIV.
The current version of FS1 is geared toward studio shows with a mix of debate, interviews and analysis and it’s finding traction among viewers. Last year’s studio programming generated a 28% increase in viewers over 2017.
As legalized sports gambling rolls out across the nation, the people who make sports television are eager to help with a series of shows explicitly about a pursuit that has long been a major — but usually unstated — reason to watch sports TV in the first place.
Lisa Byington, Danielle Slaton and Katie Witham will comprise the broadcast team when the New England Revolution visit Audi Field in Washington for Sunday night’s D.C. United match. The first time, it is believed, that announcing team will be entirely female for any of the country’s five major men’s professional team sports leagues.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — TV personality Colleen Dominguez alleges that Fox Sports 1, her employer for more than a year, was guilty of age and gender discrimination when it withheld […]
Exclusives
Fox Sports 1 and NBCSN won’t topple the No. 1 sports network anytime soon, but they are grabbing up TV sports rights, aiming to cut its lead. Bet they will.
Angry Wives, Girlfriends Give Fox The Finger
During a commercial break Friday on the network, Bradshaw was walking beside Jimmie Johnson and dropped an F-bomb expletive into a remark. The network, which launched as an ESPN competitor in August, swiftly issued an apology for airing the comment.
Fox Sports 1, the new 24-hour all-sports channel of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, is taking on reigning sports media behemoth ESPN in a way that has never happened — with deep pockets, plenty of programming and an edge. Live events, viewers, sponsors — Fox wants them all.
The new cable channel, which launched Saturday in about 90 million homes, averaged 1.7 million viewers in primetime of UFC Fight Night: Shogun vs. Sonnen. Fox Sports pulled the plug on its Speed channel at 6 a.m. ET to launch Fox Sports 1.
Fox announced Thursday that its new national sports network — Fox Sports 1 — is set to bow Saturday with all major cable, satellite and telco TV operators, including late holdouts DirecTV, Dish Network and Time Warner Cable. FS1 will be distributed to about 90 million U.S. households, according to Fox.
Regis Philbin, who turns 82 this month, is about to host Crowd Goes Wild, a sports talk show on Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox Sports 1 network.
Avoiding the carriage disputes that threatened to undermine their Aug, 17 launch, national cable channels Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports 2 are on target for distribution deals with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, DirecTV and Dish, according to sources. While the ancestors for those channels, Speed and Fuel, had existing agreements with the distributors, terms had to be renegotiated given the higher profiles that FS1 and FS2 will have nationally.
The launch of a brand-new 24-hour cable sports network is a monumental undertaking. But having to do it while simultaneously running a major network sports department within the same facility — now that’s a challenge. Welcome to the prodigious task that Fox Sports Media Group has faced over the past seven months: wholly revamping its Los Angeles production facility to house the soon-to-launch Fox Sports 1 (FS1) cable network, while maintaining Fox Sports’ day-to-day operations.
In a surprising announcement Wednesday evening, the U.S. Golf Association said it has signed a 12-year multimedia deal with Fox network and Fox Sports 1 to be the domestic broadcast partner for the U.S. Open and other USGA championships.
A month before launching its much publicized all-sports network, Fox has yet to cut carriage deals with three of the country’s four biggest distributors, raising the possibility that its August launch of Fox Sports 1 will fall short of the 90 million homes the channel is expected to have. DirecTV, Dish Network and Time Warner Cable — representing more than 46 million subscribers — still are negotiating to carry FS1 on Aug. 17, which is when Fox will turn its motorsports channel, Speed, into a multisport network.
Fox Networks is asking pay TV distributors to shell out 80 cents monthly per subscriber to carry new national sports network Fox Sports 1, with carriage fees climbing to $1.50 monthly over the life of a multi-year contract.
NEW YORK (AP) — Regis Philbin’s new colleagues were tapping away on their smartphones Monday, tweeting about his new sports talk show, and he blurted out: “All I’ve got is […]
Randy Freer, Fox Sports Media Group, co-president-COO, discussed the final sprint toward the launch of FS1 on Aug. 17 and also answered a key question during the B&C Sports Business & Technology Summit: Why? “I get asked that a lot but there is a simple and logical answer,” he said. “If you look back a few years and at the rights landscape, all of the rights agreements were going to be redone. So we could look and see that we could acquire enough rights to go out and add something that adds value and is an asset for Fox going forward.”
The soon-to-launch cable sports outlet, Fox Sports 1, will not broadcast the Super Bowl next year. Yet executives behind the scenes are making a play for the new network to get some of the Super Bowl ad dollars. The Fox broadcast network — a sister to Fox Sports 1 —will televise Super Bowl XLVIII on Feb. 2, 2014. To get one of the valuable ad slots available during the network’s broadcast of the game, sponsors have been told they must buy time in other Fox Sports content, according to ad buyers — with emphasis placed on Fox Sports 1.
How Fox Sports 1 Can Rival ESPN
ESPN is the 800-pound gorilla of the sports media world, one of the most profitable networks on TV and one of the most successful media companies of the last quarter century. Fox Sports 1 has a chance to do the unthinkable: upset the balance of power.
Fox Sports 1 will launch Aug. 17 in 90 million homes, Fox announced Tuesday, calling it the largest sports network launch in history. The network will feature sports including college football and basketball, Major League Baseball, soccer, UFC, and Nascar. In its first year it plans to air 4,800 hours of games, news and other programming, as well as daily appearances by Terry Bradshaw, who is famous for his commentary, and Regis Philbin, who is not.
