As Fox prepares to dive into streaming with plans to launch a new service by the end of the year, Chief Financial Officer Steve Tomsic emphasized that the offering is not a shift in the company’s strategy and that it’s not trying to “chase the SVOD dream” that Netflix, Disney, Paramount+, Max and Peacock are pursuing.
“The reality is, as we sit here today, there’s a better part of 50 million households in the U.S. now, outside the bundle and the streaming product that we launched is not designed to try and chase down the hyper-scale general entertainment players. It is really about offering another alternative to those consumers that are outside the bundle today,” Tomsic told Barclays’ Communications and Content Symposium on Tuesday. “Our thesis has not changed. We’re not trying to chase the SVOD dream that Netflix and Disney and Peacock and Paramount+ are all chasing. That is not our game. We remain very resolute about the strategy we’re pursuing.”
When asked about scale expectations for the new streaming service, Tomsic said that it would likely fall somewhere within the 5 million over five years previously forecasted for Venu Sports, a joint venture with Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery that was scrapped. He added that the new packaging for Fox programming would be appealing for “distributors trying to modernize and get more progressive in terms of how they bundle networks and SVOD services.”
“You should expect that the way we bring our streaming service to market will completely respect that wholesale arrangement that we have, rather than trying to pull the carpet from beneath it,” he continued. “We’re not chasing that cynical megasub target with really poor economics attached to it. We see this as being supplementary to the existing bundled environment. And as I said, we’re chasing those 50 million households that are outside of the bundle that could be picked up with a Fox overall specific bundle.”
While acknowledging that Fox’s new streaming product may accelerate cord-cutting, Tomsic emphasized that the bundle is still “the bedrock of our business and the consumption of our services for many, many years to come.”
In addition to the currently unnamed service, Fox currently operates the free, ad-supported streaming service Tubi, which has 97 million monthly active users. It also operates Fox Nation, which hit 2 million subscribers in March 2024.
