“Fox owns the fall,” declared Fox Corp. Executive Chairman-CEO Lachlan Murdoch after the company reported results for its fiscal first quarter (through Sept. 30), led by growth in the television unit.
He noted that NFL viewership is up across the industry and, excluding a “complicated” week one comparison, Fox NFL viewership is up 8%. “And our schedule only gets better,” he added.
“College football has also seen solid growth. By all measures, it’s off to its best start in recent memory. Season-to-date, average viewership of our college football games on Fox is up nearly 20% over 2019 — the most appropriate comparison, given the postponements and cancellations that characterized last year’s Covid-impacted schedules,” Murdoch told analysts.
“Major League Baseball has been a bright spot this year. The inaugural Field of Dreams game this summer was a great success, clocking nearly six million viewers and delivering the most-watched regular season baseball game in 16 years. It drew viewers en masse, notably women and teens. And from a business standpoint, was the highest revenue-generating regular season game of all time,” Murdoch said.
He also hailed a “superb” MLB post-season for Fox. “In fact, the World Series is the only content this season outside of the NFL to average over 11 million viewers and will easily outrank the NBA Finals to rank as the No. 2 championship event in professional sports this year,” Murdoch bragged.
Fox Corp. just announced an expansion of its soccer portfolio, adding the European UFEA league. Murdoch noted that it includes FoxBet rights, allowing for expansion of the sports betting platform. As for the 1,500 matches added, Murdoch said “practically all” will be on the FS1 cable network, but some will be on Fox.
“Sports betting is only legalized in six of our 18 Fox [O&O] markets, and yet we have already written approximately 20% more sports betting revenue at this early point of this fiscal year than we did across all of fiscal ’21 combined. This implies that this new category will end the year as one of the largest in local advertising,” Murdoch said in the call.
“Staying with local advertising, the overall market trends for us are quite positive, with travel, entertainment and pharmaceutical categories proving particularly robust. While we continue to observe some softness in automotive, this is being more than offset by growth in other areas,” the CEO said.
Drilling down into the just-reported fiscal first quarter, CFO Steve Tomsic said television advertising revenues increased 22% to $819 million “supported by strong ad markets, normalized schedules on the Fox network and sustained momentum on Tubi.” He also noted a full slate of college football on Fox, the return of the MLB All-Star Game, and the inaugural broadcast of the Field of Dreams game.
“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,” Tomsic concluded.
16 May 2024
23 May 2024
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