Executives at Fox Corporation have discussed the possibility of pairing their forthcoming streaming service Fox One with products offered by peer entertainment companies, The Desk has learned.
The on-and-off talks include discussions with executives at Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) and the Walt Disney Company about including Fox One in a novel streaming bundle launched last year that includes access to Disney Plus, Hulu and Max (soon to be renamed HBO Max), two sources confirmed to The Desk several weeks ago. The deal would allow Fox One to exist within a current bundle that already includes the other three services.
Another plan discussed would pair Fox One, Max and a forthcoming plan called “ESPN Unlimited” at a single price point, the sources said. The bundle would be a similar offering to what would have been Venu Sports, a sports-focused streaming app being developed by Fox, WBD and Disney through a joint venture that was sued out of existence.
Last month, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said the company was discussing potential partners with others, but didn’t specifically name the other parties involved. A Fox spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s plans to bundle Fox One with peer services. Multicast News was the first to report on Fox’s interest in bundling Fox One with Max on Monday. (Multicast News and The Desk are owned by Solano Media.)
A bundling arrangement between Fox, Disney and WBD is likely to invite less legal or regulatory scrutiny than Venu Sports: Rather than develop a new service, the companies would retain control and ownership over their own streaming services, and continue to sell their services as standalone products. The bundle would also provide added value by including the on-demand content libraries of Disney Plus, Hulu, Max and Fox Nation, none of which were announced for Venu Sports.
Fox has held separate talks with Disney and WBD about bundling Fox One with their services, too, the sources said. The discussions took place before WBD’s announcement on Monday that it intends to spin off its linear TV business, including TNT Sports, into a separate “Global Networks” venture while retaining Max and its film and TV studios business.
Fox is free to pursue bundling arrangements with other services, including Comcast’s Peacock and Paramount Global’s Paramount Plus with Showtime, though it isn’t clear whether the company has held discussions with Comcast or Paramount to that effect. Under the terms of its Venu Sports joint venture, all three participants were prohibited from bundling their networks or streaming apps with Comcast- and Paramount-owned products.
Fox One is launching at a particularly curious time for Fox: Unlike other companies, Fox continues to earn a health amount from cable and satellite companies — it raked in $1.94 billion in pay TV revenue during its most recent financial quarter — owed in large part to the fact that its live TV networks are still mostly available exclusively through traditional pay TV bundles.
But executives are also keenly aware that the cable TV business continues to be distressed, with higher churn over the years leading to even-higher fees charged to cable and satellite companies which, in turn, leads to greater churn.
Fox One is expected to be a compromise — one that allows sports and news fans to watch Fox-owned channels, but at a price that might convince them to stick with cable for a little while longer. At launch, Fox One will charge between $20 to $25 per month for its service, sources said, but the cost to access Fox One through a bundle will be similar to the price structures of other bundles, more comparable to the wholesale price Fox charges cable and satellite companies for the distribution of its live TV networks, which will save streamers if they prefer to buy multiple services at a single price point.
