Executives at Fox Corporation have offered a rare look inside the company’s sweeping technology overhaul that rebuilt the infrastructure powering its broadcast networks, sports channels and streaming platforms.
During a webinar hosted by industry publication TV News Check called “Accelerating Fox’s Tech Transformation: The Gryphon Project and Beyond,” Fox’s Chief Technology Officer and President of Digital Paul Cheesbrough and Executive Vice President of Media and Broadcast Operations Jeff Dow outlined how the company developed a new cloud-centric architecture capable of managing and distributing hundreds of thousands of hours of programming each year.
The system now feeds content to more than 200 Fox affiliated television stations and more than 800 distribution partners nationwide, supporting both traditional broadcast outlets and digital platforms.
The technology transformation traces back to the $71 billion transaction that saw the Walt Disney Company acquire much of 21st Century Fox in March 2019. While the deal reshaped the entertainment landscape, it also created an unusual opportunity for Fox to rebuild its technical infrastructure from the ground up.
“One of the largely untold stories behind the $71 billion Fox-Disney deal that closed in March 2019 is how Fox Corp wound up using it to completely replace the underlying technology for all its remaining businesses,” executives said during the webinar.
Fox had already begun migrating toward cloud-based workflows in 2017 as the company grappled with accelerating growth in streaming video and new production formats like 4K. Cheesbrough said the technology team saw the cloud as a way to modernize operations across production and distribution.
“We were really trying to embrace the cloud as that kind of infrastructure to drive workflow change and workflow opportunity within both production and distribution,” Cheesbrough said.
During negotiations with Disney, Fox executives pushed to transfer as much legacy infrastructure as possible to the businesses being sold. That strategy allowed Fox to start fresh with what Cheesbrough described as “a blank sheet of paper.”
The result was the Gryphon Project, a two-year effort to build a new cloud-native operations center in Tempe, Arizona, with backup facilities in Los Angeles and within the Amazon Web Services public cloud.
A key component of the transition was the Transitional Services Agreement signed as part of the Disney deal. Under that arrangement, Disney temporarily continued operating Fox’s legacy broadcast infrastructure for two years while Fox rebuilt its systems.
“It was the same technology, and the same people were operating those services, they were just owned and overseen by Disney,” Cheesbrough explained. “That freed up my team to fully focus on building out the new infrastructure with no distractions on how they were running the previous infrastructure.”
Fox moved quickly to complete the transformation even as major broadcast events loomed, including the company’s broadcast of the Super Bowl in February 2020.
“We absolutely had to be brave,” Cheesbrough said. “We transferred everything from our finance systems to our broadcast operations. We did that in a year.”
The company ultimately chose Tempe as the location for its new technical hub, citing lower real estate costs and reduced exposure to risks such as earthquakes compared with Los Angeles. The facility is located on Arizona State University’s technology campus, with a smaller backup operation maintained in Los Angeles.
Staffing the new operation required a shift toward software-focused technical roles. Fox reduced its technical workforce from roughly 500 employees before the Disney transaction, transferring around 40 workers and hiring approximately 200 new employees in Tempe.
Many recruits came from Arizona State University’s Fulton School of Engineering and Walter Cronkite School of Journalism.
“We were transitioning to much more software-centric skills and moving away from hardware-centric skills,” Cheesbrough said.
Dow said Fox established internal training programs pairing recent graduates with experienced broadcast technicians.
“We’ll start them out on the lower end cable channels like Fox Soccer, and let them cut their teeth on that, get experience and gain confidence, and then move them up to FS1 and FS2 primetime,” Dow said. “Then it’s great to see, after a year, one of these grads handling an NFL game on their own.”
Fox also launched a new internship program with ASU allowing seniors to work on live production elements including the “1st & Ten” virtual graphic used during NFL and college football broadcasts.
“What an exciting thing, because that gives these young men and women the opportunity to do actual real production work on a Big Ten game or an NFL game,” Dow said.
At the core of Fox’s system is a deep integration with Amazon Web Services. Cheesbrough described the architecture as a “triangle of resilience,” combining infrastructure in Tempe and Los Angeles with full redundancy in the AWS cloud.
The cloud platform now handles virtually all of Fox’s media services functions, including content acquisition, encoding, transcoding, editing, captioning, archival storage and distribution.
“When you look at resiliency it’s spread across multiple availability zones, US-East-2 and US-West-2,” Dow said.
Part of the AWS network backbone runs directly through the Tempe facility, giving Fox high-capacity connectivity with AWS transit centers across the country.
“It’s almost worth looking at Tempe as…a region within AWS, it’s that connected to them,” Cheesbrough said.
The new operation also relies on significantly fewer technology vendors than Fox’s legacy systems. Dow said the Tempe facility operates with roughly seven or eight key suppliers compared with about 30 vendors previously.
Key partners include Evertz, Mediakind and TAG Video Systems, whose monitoring software oversees Fox’s linear and streaming program feeds.
TAG Chief Strategy and Cloud Officer Peter Wharton said the project represents a broader shift across the broadcast industry toward cloud-driven operations.
“What Fox has really done is break down these silos,” Wharton said. “They’re able to leverage the same technology across their entire workflow and break down these silos that had previously been the norm. So that gives them flexibility and agility to launch new services and adapt to the future.”
