NEW YORK—Fox Corporation’s Q1, 2024 earnings report and call with analysts saw the company report notable growth in its streaming service Tubi and increases in affiliate fee revenue for its TV segment, which includes the Fox-owned local TV stations, despite cord cutting and the ongoing decline of pay TV subscriptions.
While advertising declined by 2%, the company reported that sports helped boost overall viewing of the Fox brands by 2%.
Revenue for the quarter and earnings per share generally beat analyst expectations.
In the earnings call with analysts, Lachlan Murdoch, executive chair and CEO said that “with total viewing of FOX brands up 2% in the quarter. Fox Sports was a big driver of that consumption especially, with its broadcast of the Women's World Cup where the US versus the Netherlands on Fox was the most watched Women's World Cup game match, ever on US English language television.”
Murdoch also expects “engagement to improve significantly,” as the NFL and college football seasons progress.
“At Tubi, we had another enviable quarter delivering 30% revenue growth driven by an impressive 65% lift in total view time,” Murdoch said. “Tubi surpassed 70 million monthly active users in September, logged nearly four billion streaming hours in the first half of the calendar year and remains the number one AVOD player and most watched free ad-supported TV streaming service in the United States. Additionally, Tubi has beaten Pluto Max Paramount+ and Peacock in view time for five consecutive months. One reason for the high engagement level that Tubi is its extensive content library that now exceeds 60,000 titles which translates into more than 225,000 movies and TV episodes in addition to approximately 300 fast channels.”
“Tubi also offers a unique and compelling proposition to advertisers,” he added. “Our recent MRI study of streaming peers concluded that Tubi saw the fastest growth amongst young and diverse populations. And that Tubi is able to deliver high-value, net new audiences with 33% of Tubi streamers unreachable on other top AVOD services.”
In terms of affiliate fees, the company acknowledged the fact that cord cutting continues to reduce pay TV subs but Steve Tomsic, CFO, said that their television segment “delivered total quarterly revenues of $1.78 billion or a 4% increase year-over-year. This was driven by an 8% increase in TV affiliate revenues with healthy growth in fees across all Fox-affiliated stations more than offset the impact from industry subscriber declines.”
Tomsic reported, however, that “cable affiliate revenues were down 2% in the quarter, largely a result of industry subscriber declines, which continue to run in the 8% range.”
