Jesse Watters isn’t known for his athletic prowess, but he may be a hit with streaming sports fans all the same.
When Fox Corp. initially launched its new Fox One streaming service in the fall of last year, executives steeled themselves for a wave of sign-ups by cord-cutters who were eager to stream the company’s popular fall football package. After pigskin season ended, these people reasoned, activity might dwindle for a little while.
Instead, Fox executives have been surprised to see football fans stick around for a chance to check out Fox News Channel programs like “Jesse Watters Primetime” and “The Five.”
During the company’s recent fiscal third quarter “over half of the viewership on Fox One” came from people watching news, said Lachlan Murdoch, Fox’s CEO, on a call with investors. He added: “We’re really not seeing a tremendous amount of churn within Fox One to date, so we’re very pleased with that.” Fox has not released subscriber totals for the nascent service.
Fox’s efforts to cater to a digitally savvy cohort to boost the fortunes of its news operations will no doubt be watched by other mainstream TV-news outlets. Versant’s MS NOW plans to launch a new subscription offering that will aim at its “community” of users, executives from the company said during a recent investor call. Warner Bros. Discovery’s CNN estimates that its digital users are about a decade younger than viewers of its mainstay cable operation. The company says subscribers to its new subscription offering are “pacing ahead” of targets.
All this work comes amid projections suggesting cable subscriptions will likely continue to erode. Subscribers at all three of the nation’s biggest cable-news outlets are poised to drop between 7% and 9% between the end of 2024 and the end of 2026, according to Kagan, a market-research firm that it part of S&P Global Intelligence.
New concepts abound as TV-news kingpins work to meet younger viewers in new environments. Trey Yingst, the Fox News foreign correspondent, offers dispatches via TikTok. Steve Kornacki, the NBC News polling guru, holds forth via a streaming “Kornacki Cam” during primaries and other races that might not pre-empt programming on the NBC broadcast network.
Fox News Channel remains powerful in the modern media ecosystem, but like its rivals, has in the past been seen as attracting an older consumer more acquainted with linear TV viewing. Now Fox News may be getting a wave of interest from a younger cohort.
“We’ve clearly captured some of these customers that were either sports fans and now starting to watch news or news fans who were watching sports,” says Pete Distad, CEO of Fox’s streaming operations. “We have typical news customers coming back three and a half times a week and they are watching 10-plus hours of Fox News Channel.”
Executives estimate the average age of Fox One subscribers is “younger than the traditional cable customer,” says Distad, adding that the typical user is “not as young as a mobile-social-first Generation Alpha. It’s a little bit older than that.”
Fox One has begun rolling out new features aimed at spurring news audiences to check out even more, says Amit Dudakia, the streaming outlet’s senior vice president of product.
The streaming outlet currently offers mobile users the chance to watch news segments identified by a specific subject of interest. “We’re now providing customers the ability to just really quickly jump back and see what the topics are they might have missed and quickly get to those moments,” he says. Such an option allows users to find segmented tied to particular areas of interest, rather than having to fast forward through an hour or two of a linear program to find a moment. “What we have seen is incredibly promising in that users who are engaging with those topics go on to watch a lot more,” he adds.
Executives are also testing Fox One “playlists” keyed around a certain subject, which line up vertical video around anything from talk of the economy to the ongoing U.S. conflict with Iran.
One feature called “Ask Fox” allows users to tell Fox One what types of content they may be interested in and then be given a sort of guide to what is available. “It’s really hard for a user to come in and discover and engage with content when all you see is just endless carousels of thumbnails, and you have to then rely on imagery and a description to help drive a user to watch that piece of content,” says Dudakia. “What we believe is that users really care more about topics and events.”
Fox One is likely to use plans tied to the company’s rights deal to show the coming World Cup to help broaden the way they highlight news content to subscribers, says Distad. “You can imagine that some of that technology that we’re building around the World Cup that will allow you, for example, in a single view, to see information and scores and data about what’s going on for your particular team or for the match,” he says. “We intend to take that and apply it to other big events from the news perspective. You can imagine midterms will be a very big moment for us.”
Fox News’ Watters may want to start memorizing a few NFL stats.
