Fox planning to launch D2C service this year carrying sports and news, reveals Lachlan Murdoch
Fox is planning to launch a streaming service by the end of the year, ending a years-long spell as the only US studio without a paid direct-to-consumer (D2C) offering.

Lachlan Murdoch (photo: Fox Corp)
Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on Tuesday the company is currently working on the service, which will include sports and news programming, although he offered few details.
The exec did not discuss what other types of content might be included on the service. Under its multi-year deal with Disney, the majority of Fox’s entertainment programming streams on Hulu the day after it airs on the main Fox broadcast network.
During Fox Corp’s second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, Murdoch emphasised to analysts that the new D2C offering is not intended to cannibalise revenues that Fox derives from cable.
“We are designing an offering to really target those cord-cutters and cord-nevers that are not traditionally in the cable bundle. We have no intention of churning a traditional distribution customer into our D2C customer,” he said, adding that its subscriber expectations are “modest” for the new service.
The announcement of the move comes a month after the launch of Venu, a planned sports streamer combining the various sporting rights owned by Disney, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), was called off.
While Disney and WBD both have streaming assets for their sports offerings, the scrapping of the service has meant Fox does not have a streaming outlet on which to show its sports programming.
Fox already owns the AVoD streaming platform Tubi, which has become a meaningful part of its content ecosystem. That service will reach profitability this year, Fox execs said.
However, the announcement of the new paid streaming offering marks a major move for Fox, which has for years opted to sit out the streaming wars. Despite the potential gravity of the move, Murdoch was keen to impress on investors that Fox has not lost confidence in the cable bundle to deliver revenue.
“We see the traditional cable bundle as still the most value for our consumers, and frankly, the most value for the company,” he said.
“We’re huge supporters of the traditional cable bundle and we will always be. But having said that, we do want to reach consumers wherever they are. And there’s a large population that are now outside of the traditional cable bundle.”