Fox Corporation’s recent financial results show record revenues for the company driven in part by an 8% annual revenue increase in their television division compared to the previous 12 months and while this is extremely promising there’s more going on at Fox than is immediately apparent. The success can partly be attributed to the broadcast of major sporting events Super Bowl LVII and the FIFA World Cup, however these events are not annual on the network so it’s important to look at the rest of the Fox Television picture.
Using data from Show Tracker we can look at the scripted commissions from past annual seasons and see the changes in strategy since the 2019/20 season which was the first full season after the Disney-Fox merger was completed. In order to transition away from Disney the network commissioned eight new TV shows with only a couple of renewed shows. While this is somewhat to be expected it’s interesting to see Fox return to having fewer new shows whilst it is still trying to offset the loss of losing regular stalwart Thursday Night Football to Amazon’s Prime Video. This gap was initially filled with the two renewed sitcoms Call Me Kat and Welcome to Flatch, with neither quite able to compensate for the loss of viewers that live football once brought to the network.
The network also recently renewed 9-1-1: Lone Star for a new season but cancelled the spin-offs origin show, 9-1-1, leaving Disney (the show’s distributor) to air its seventh season on ABC instead.
Fox have also been teaming up with a larger array of distribution partners in the last couple of years, a very expected outcome given the incorporation of 20th Century Fox Distribution into Disney’s distribution arm. Disney does still make up just under half of the third-party distributors that sell Fox commissioned titles internationally but it’s a proportion we can reasonably expect to even out amongst other distributors over time, especially given that there hasn’t been a single commission in the 2022/23 annual season to both be commissioned by Fox and distributed by Disney.
Fox meanwhile has launched its own distribution arm, Fox Entertainment Global, which has become responsible for the distribution a number of FOX commissioned series over the past few years, with Monarch and Animal Control the two most recent examples. The former Monarch, despite its cancellation after one season, has been successfully sold to a variety of services internationally including Paramount+ in Latin America and Australia.
While several sales occurred shortly after its premiere, a number have been much more recent – including Sony’s acquisition of the title in both India and Spain. 60% of these international premieres were sold to studio owned services, with their larger pockets as buyers making it increasingly harder for local buyers to acquire content for their services.
Another major part to Fox’s television strategy this season is the contribution of AVOD service Tubi, while incurring considerable marketing investment in the past year its growth has been quoted in the recent quarter reports to help increase advertising revenues despite losses in these areas by Fox Entertainment.
Tubi’s original output has largely been focused on movies, but investment in scripted TV is also present. Their first original The Freak Brothers (distributed by Lionsgate) has more recently been supplemented by the second half of HBO’s The Nevers. A careful investment strategy can ensure that Tubi can facilitate a reasonable growth of content through acquisitions such as these. With the level of investment Fox seem keen to make into growing Tubi it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if Fox continues this trend while continuing to renew cheaper long running shows on the flagship channel.
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