Fox Corporation (FOXA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Let's get started with the next session. So we have Steve Tomsic from FOX, who's CFO at FOX. Steve, thanks so much for being here, Great to have you.

Thanks for having us.

So FOX is interesting in many ways because you made a very contrarian bet and you're stuck with traditional media when all your peers were essentially plowing all the capital into streaming. And it seems like in hindsight, it worked out for you guys better than your peers for the most part. And you guys have just announced a streaming package now. So could you just talk about the transition? I mean you made a decision which was different, and now you seem to be going towards streaming. So what changed? And how do you think the ecosystem evolves going forward?

So not a lot has changed. And I think our announcement around streaming shouldn't be seen as being a change of strategy or a change in view about how the market is developing. If I look at our absolute performance, our relative performance versus peers, you look at the numbers we delivered in Q2, we've probably never had more conviction around the strategy and the business model. So we feel really, really happy about the composition of assets and our capacity to monetize those assets and deliver profitable growth. When you look at the announcement around streaming and our strategy over the last 6 years, we still hold the view that the Disney transaction created 2 things. One is a hyperscale competitor in the general entertainment SVOD space. And there is a different basis of competition versus where we play, which is largely live sports and news with a bunch of other assets on top. And so in that hyperscale SVOD space, you need to have the scale and entertainment and the delivery mechanism of SVOD is a real enhancement to the consumer experience. In the live sports and new space, sort of going digital, whether it be direct, sort of there's no notion of SVOD, right? But the games happen when the games are scheduled, and news happens when news happens. And so that delivery mechanism does nothing for the consumer. In fact, the kind of the fragmentation of media has actually worked to the detriment of consumers from our perspective. But the reality is, as we sit here today, there's a better part of 50 million households in the U.S. that are now outside the bundle and the streaming product that we launched is not designed to try and chase down the hyperscale general entertainment players. It is really about offering another alternative to those consumers that are outside the bundle today. And that needs to be seen in the context of the fact that we had a Venu JV that we tried to get off the ground that was going to try and address that population that obviously dissolved for various reasons. But it also needs to be seen in the context of distributors at the moment, looking to modernize and be a bit more progressive with how they bundle networks and now they handle SVOD services with core networks. And so our thesis hasn't changed. And so we don't -- 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 sort of very resolute about the strategy we're pursuing.

Got it. And I guess one of the risks to this approach could be, of course, that consumers -- by fall of this year, including your product, ESPN is going direct-to-consumer. So almost every piece of sport in the U.S. will be available on streaming in some form. And that may, in theory, accelerate cord cutting, especially given some of the price points we are starting to see for ESPN. Looks like it may come in at $25, which seems pretty low given that Netflix at the premium tier is $23, and this has all the sports. So broadly, how do you think about cord-cutting going forward when all these packages go live?

I think you got to look at it -- sort of goes back to what I said initially, which is the sport -- we have got as FOX, an amazing sports franchise in this country, right, with FOX Sports with the kind of rights that we have. But we don't monopolize all the sports rights. Disney has a fantastic sports franchise with ESPN. They don't monopolize all the sports rights. So if you're a true -- there are very few sports fans who are single sports fans, right? And so even if you love NFL and that's your only sport, you need a multitude of streaming services in order to consume sports. When you have to combine those services yourself with subscribing to this -- not on demand, so this streaming service, that streaming service, the next one, the next one. Sort of the price point begins to escalate where you sort of think, well, why didn't I just buy the bundle. And then the user interface is terrible, right? It's like you're switching between apps. You can't -- like the old version of surfing between different games or different sports. It just becomes exponentially more painful, right? And so the consumer is being dealt, nothing to their benefit in that environment. So from our perspective, when you see all of these services lined up and you see what it costs to reaggregate them and what it means from a sort of living room experience, our belief is that people will actually value the bundle more. And as the bundle, to sort of coin Lachlan's phrase, becomes more jacked in terms of lower price point, but with much more compelling sports and news offerings, which FOX seems to be a bedrock of right now, we think people are going to migrate more towards that than trying to migrate towards this fragmented sort of a streaming service available sort of piecemeal-by-piecemeal. So maybe there is more cord-cutting around the edges for that streaming product. But really, I think what it really does do is highlight the value and the convenience of the bundle, which we still believe will be the bedrock of our business and the consumption of our services for many, many years to come.

Got it. Yes, I mean, to that point, I guess, we've had a couple of years where the pace of cord-cutting seem to accelerate. And it was at least mid-single digits for most networks and faster for a lot of others. But you were not impacted because you had this renewal cycle for affiliate and retrans, which kept your growth pretty healthy relative to the rest of the industry. And now, to your point, bundles are getting skinnier and more affordable and more concentrated in terms of sports and so on. So if that trend continues, there's a chance that maybe cord-cutting slows down and you have the tailwinds from some of these renewals you've done recently. So shouldn't your affiliates fee trend continue? Is there something that takes away from that narrative?

So listen, I'll avoid the question in terms of going -- in terms of forward guidance on our affiliates. If you look back, right, I was just looking at it, when we did our Investor Day, 5 or so years ago, sort of retrans was sort of a big focus of ours. And I think the trailing 12 months on retrans for us was $1.650 billion in retrans. If I look at the trailing 12 months for sort of calendar year '24 we're close to $3.3 billion. So we've doubled retrans in that period of time. And like it's hard to get insights into sort of where our competitors are, but I'd be surprised if anyone is anywhere near that kind of growth that we've seen. And we've had pretty -- even this last quarter, we had 4% growth across the whole -- sorry, 6% growth across the whole but 4% in cable. I'd be surprised if anyone is doing 4% growth in domestic cable affiliate fee growth. You're right in the sense that over the last 5 or 6 years since the establishment of FOX, we've been able to outrun subscriber declines by being able to get better value on a per subscriber basis on a rate card basis for our networks. If I look at the sort of the short-to-medium term looking forward, we're going to be the sort of that forward view about where our affiliate fee revenue growth is going to be much more a function of subs as opposed to rates because if I look for the balance of this fiscal year, we're pretty much through -- we are through all the major renewals this fiscal year. So there's nothing that's going to touch our sort of rates for the next couple of quarters. And then if I look into fiscal '26, we've got a pretty light renewal profile, like we're less than 1/4 of the book is up for renewal. So we look at it, then we look at what the volume side looks like. And it's still too -- like we're encouraged by the fact that sub declines have moderated over the last couple of sequential quarters. But we're also like one of the [ swallows ] don't make a summer, right? And so we're very sort of encouraged by that. We're encouraged by the fact that that's even before some of these sort of more concentrated bundles have come to market. And I think importantly, with those more concentrated bundles is the ones that you've seen actually advertised come with virtually the full suite of FOX channels. It's not just our sports networks. It's sports and news, which are the key economic drivers of the business. And so we feel -- as I said, we're encouraged by how trends are going. But mindful of the fact that we've got less leverage from a rate perspective, and we've got sort of more around where volume goes for the next few quarters.

Got it. And when you think about these distribution deals, both with MVPDs as well as local broadcast partners. I'm assuming some of this -- the plans that you have on the streaming side, to some extent, are incorporated in it. So maybe could you talk about what impact the streaming launch may or may not have on these trends? And then any scale ambitions you have on the streaming front? I mean how does that offset against some of these distribution deals?

Yes. So I think the way you should look at it is kind of the posture we took with respect to Venu, which was Venu was sort of a third-party service where we're going to have equity in, but we would supply our channels and get our whole -- sort of typical wholesale rate for the supply of those channels. Venu's price point would pretty well known. And so -- and our scale of ambition was pretty well known, right? We talked about 5 million subs in 5 years. Now there's 2 less partners in that. So you should expect our scale of ambition to be inside that 5 million over 5 years, right? But you shouldn't expect our philosophy to have changed in that, right, which is we still firmly believe, not just because we've got really, really strong relationships with our end distributors as well as our network affiliate partners. But it's because it's the best way for the consumer to get the service through those kind of bundles. So we -- you should expect that the way we bring our streaming service to the market will completely respect that sort of wholesale arrangement that we have rather than try and sort of pull the carpet from beneath it. And so we don't -- we're not we're not chasing the -- we're not chasing that sort of cynical mega sub target with really poor economics attached to it. We see this as being supplementary to the existing bundle environment. And as I said, we're chasing those 50 million households that are outside of the bundle that could be picked up from -- with sort of the FOX overall specific bundle.

Got it. One of the interesting experiments you guys did recently was with the Super Bowl and you broadcast it for free on Tubi. So could you talk about what you saw there in terms of the degree to which it complemented broadcast versus the degree to which it cannibalized it? Overall, audience was, of course, pretty big. So what was your experience from that? And how could you use that going forward?

So the Super Bowl for us was -- we put out a release a couple of weeks ago. It was an amazing day for us $800 million -- north of $800 million across the company gross in that day in terms of revenues. Fantastic viewership across the whole portfolio, so 126 million, 127 million viewers. If I look at Tubi within that, like it's not new for us to expose the Super Bowl for free on digital. We've done it on foxsports.com in the past. It's kind of like -- it's a bit of a circuit breaker for us because you get this surge of people coming to watch it and then it's just better off opening it up because if you're trying to authenticate with all these customers coming in at once, it's just tricky. And so we've done it for the last couple of Super Bowls with respect to foxsports.com. We thought this was an amazing opportunity to showcase Tubi as a kind of a one-off. We're not -- Tubi is not in the sports, in the high-profile sports strategy game. And when we look at it sort of within that 126 million, 127 million total viewership, I think Tubi had close to -- or just north of 24 million uniques across the day, watching the Super Bowl telecast, we peaked at 15.5 million concurrents, which is a record streaming, which is fantastic. And then if you look at the demo that watched the game like I think 40% of Tubi viewers were between the ages of 18 and 34 and half of those were female. And so in that -- from our perspective, it was more complementary and additive, what -- from a viewership perspective than what otherwise would have been consumed. So we feel really, really good about sort of what we were able to deliver for ourselves as well as for the NFL. From a Tubi sort of more go-forward perspective, one of the most important things we were looking to achieve was sort of more brand recognition as well as registrations, right? Because being able to have more capacity to target the Tubi viewer is obviously helpful from an advertising perspective, driving CPMs, driving better share in terms of programmatic. And so when we look at the number of new registrations we got for Tubi across that Super Bowl window. It was in the order of [ 17 million, ] which is just fantastic for us. And so that now needs to sort of sort of prove itself out in terms of Tubi able to drive that ad revenue off those sort of identifiable users, being able to get that sort of brand recognition, people being sampling the product and coming back towards it but we feel sort of really, really well indicated from using that Super Bowl piece to drive Tubi. Not to mention the fact that Tubi had a couple of ad spots in the Super Bowl itself.

Yes. Another business that's doing really well right now is FOX News. And you've seen a lot of growth even as your peers post-election, they have seen very different trends. And so could you talk about what's going on in the business? Is your growth more a function of the inclusion of your peers? Or is it more tailwinds from maybe the demographics of your viewership base aligning with the administration? Like what are you guys seeing there?

I won't talk about implosion [indiscernible] I think you got to have a little bit of humility here, right? Because if you look -- it wasn't that long ago that we made some pretty significant changes to our prime-time opinion lineup. And at conferences like these, where people were talking about are you ever going to get your viewers back, is this existential, blah, blah, blah. You fast forward now to where we are today, where if I look at our audience -- and listen, we compete with the 2 other major cable news nets, but really the audiences are somewhat bifurcated, right? There's some in the middle that we all fight for. But if I look at our audiences alone and look at sort of where we are sort of January, we're north of 50% higher audience versus where we were 12 months ago. If I look at just that post-election, where we are today versus where we were 4 years ago, where we were 8 years ago in that sort of post-election newsy window. We're sort of -- we're north -- we're 28% north of where we were 4 years ago, and we're actually ahead of where we were 8 years ago, notwithstanding there's a fair amount of sub decline that's happened over those 8 years. And so from a viewership perspective, we are absolutely up, and the health of the network has never been more apparent. From a share perspective, the numbers are crazy, right? We're doing mid- to high 60% share reviewing amongst those cable news nets, which -- no one has got a plan to say that's going to be sustained forever. But we certainly believe in sort of our viewership metrics, it will come off. The news cycle will come off. Our competitors will find their feet again after the election. What's interesting is that maybe different mindset shift across the country. But the competitors did super well after the Trump election win, whereas we haven't seen that in a couple of months since now. But like FOX news is in unbelievable good health from a viewership perspective. And so -- and I think that goes to the quality of the coverage, whether it be the election coverage, it's been very easy in terms of general news. And so I think people underestimate -- people tend to focus in on the opinion programming, but it really is the breadth of the schedule that really is the signal of its strength. So it's like it starts with FOX & Friends in the morning. We have The Five in the afternoon, which is one of the most rated 1 hour of cable news in the country, then you go through opinion through prime and you have Gutfeld! who consistently outrates all the late nights. So the strength of the schedule is amazing.

Got it. And I guess this also is starting to flow into the pool of advertisers you're able to tap into. I mean, based on your comments last quarter, I mean, on the earnings call, it feels like it's starting to broaden out a lot more. Is it structural? Or is this just an artifact of the election or something that happened after it? So could you talk about that a little bit?

I don't know if I'd use the word structural. It feels enduring. And I say that for 2 reasons, right. One is it feels like there's a mindset change in the country that has liberated advertisers and agencies to feel good about advertising on FOX News. And so therefore, you've seen just in the last couple of months 100 new blue-chip advertisers join the roster to advertise on FOX News, which is again a fantastic testament to the quality of the service. Not only are those 100 advertisers coming on to the platform, but you'd have these crazy things where they would blacklist certain shows because they didn't want to be in that hour, right? A ton more shows are now being white-listed within the FOX News schedule, which is great. So I look at it from that perspective. And then I look at it from just the outright what are advertisers really chasing. And so they're really chasing eyeballs and reach, right? And FOX News' reach can no longer be denied, right? I just went through the audience statistics versus prior year. If I just look at our January share of prime-time viewing, right? And now looking at the 4 broadcast nets plus FOX News because we increasingly think of FOX News as a fifth forecast net. It did a 23% share of prime time. So if you're an advertiser looking to get your brand out there, looking to get your product out there, yes, sure, you're going to go to the 4 broadcast nets, and you want to buy your sports to get mass reach, but FOX News becomes a really, really necessary element of that media buy. And so as a function of that, like what we've seen in terms of sort of that advertiser demand, we're seeing sort of -- when we talk about national advertising, which is typically these blue-chip advertisers, we look at their CPMs and they're sort of 50% north of where they were buying in last year's upfront for FOX News. And then so that's super helpful to have those new advertisers come in and create price tension in the schedule. And it also helps with respect to DR where is an important element of our FOX News advertising revenue. Look at that and the DR rates are sort of high 20s versus where they were a year ago. And so listen, the metrics from a viewership perspective, the metrics from a monetization perspective are fantastically strong for FOX News at the moment.

Great. I guess one with the issues with the FOX News business, if there are any right now, is basically trying to convert that or pivot that to -- the streaming ecosystem tends to be a lot more difficult just given how -- what kind of content people consume on streaming, and it doesn't feel very organic in that sense. You do have a product out there in FOX Nation. So could you talk about what the experience thus far is with FOX Nation? And you recently announced an acquisition as well of Red Seat Ventures and how does that fit into the digital strategy?

I think that FOX News tends to be thought of as being just the linear channel and maybe FOX Business as the secondary linear channel. It's so much more than that. And it's so much more than that -- like we call the business sort of FOX News Media because it encompasses many different platforms, right? So when you look at our sort of digital assets, yes, Nation is one of those, and it's an important one, and Red Seat Ventures will become an important one for us. But you start with foxnews.com, right? which is now north of 120 million unique viewers, right -- unique users. And that is a healthy part of our overall advertising revenue that comes through foxnews.com. Then you look at where we are from a sort of more -- outside of our own environment, right? So if you look at YouTube and how many views we had in January, sort of FOX News videos on YouTube, it was 410 million views on YouTube, which is 2.5x what NBC did, right? So then I look at where we are socially sort of across X or Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, 1 billion across those platforms. So it's not as if we've ignored digital, right? We are front and center on digital. And so FOX Nation is just an extension of that with respect to like the moment that service -- caters for the FOX News super fan but wants to continue to consume FOX News on a lean-back basis in their living room, probably [ rusted-on ] viewers for the linear channel, and they want to see more content that sort of is around that genre and around those verticals on a subscription basis. And then we have other services, again, that sort of surround our viewership with like audio. And so when we look at audio and we look at the phenomena around podcast that sort of we're into the [indiscernible] of the election. So this is a legitimate space. We already have a podcast business within FOX News. This is going to become a more important space, and FOX generally has gotten more than just a legitimate reason to be able to participate in that. So we acquired Red Seat Ventures and Red Seat Ventures gives us a play in that podcast with talent that isn't on our platform right now. But it also gives us an opportunity to sort of broaden our relationship with existing talent and take them on a podcast -- and take them into the podcast world, if that's the right thing to do. And so we see that as being -- getting us exposure to the podcast business, but also being able to double down with our talent in the podcast business. And so we expect that to be a nice little goal for us over the coming years.

Got it. And given all this momentum, I mean, you have a lot of digital inventory, you obviously spoke about FOX News, you have a certain base amount of sports going into the upfronts with a lot of momentum behind you. But then the offset, I guess, is there's a lot of streaming inventory also coming in. Netflix is trying to push a lot of inventory as is Amazon and so on. So how do you see the upfront season playing out? Do rates remain stable? Is there any risk to that?

I think it's going to be different for different players. So I can speak to sort of our portfolio. And you're right, we are we are carrying a ton of momentum into the upfronts, right? Because if you look at it, it feels like there's a flow of money that seems to -- if you look at the viewership of in particular, cable entertainment networks, you see that viewership really, really start to dissipate. And so the flow of dollars is moving away from there and seems to be going into sort of broadcast sports and news and then into streaming. If I look at sort of where we play, which is largely sports and news, particularly on the linear side and then we have Tubi, which absorbs those streaming dollars, like we are seeing -- we've seen it right through this fiscal year in terms of the bid for sports has been phenomenal, right? It started with our Summer of Soccer way back when, when we had UEFA and we had Copa America, that's continued right through. We had a crazy MLB season. NFL, the bid was amazing even though we had a pretty lackluster schedule in terms of blowout games right through the year. You saw it with Super Bowl, and that just continues through. Even spring where our schedule tends to be a little bit lighter, we like we've got really good bid for properties like NASCAR, MLB, even UFL. And so the health of that sports ecosystem, to me seems unquestionable, we'll see that -- and that's our biggest vertical from an advertising perspective. So we feel pretty good about going into the upfronts with that. I've spoken to you about where FOX News is out at the moment. Now that's less of an upfront business. It tends to be a lot more spot. Cable entertainment, even cable entertainment is being the beneficiary -- sorry, broadcast entertainment is a beneficiary of some of those cable entertainment dollars moving to just bigger reach platforms. And so our broadcast entertainment business is doing reasonably well at the moment, albeit a small piece. And Tubi, you've seen that sequential growth in revenue, right? So we are plus 31%. We were plus 7% back in Q4 of our last fiscal year, we've grown that up to plus 31% in the quarter that we just did. So we feel fantastic about Tubi's sort of prospects in the upfront, and it becomes an important part of that upfront recipe for us. The only place where there's real sort of variability in the ad market, I think, is local. And so our local business has come off a massive political. It's having the benefit of being able to sell Super Bowl in this current quarter. But there how the remainder of the year plays out, and it's less on upfront because it's all spot purchases, is a bit more mixed.

Got it. Maybe one last question, we're already out of time. But in terms of sports costs, I guess, MLB's -- Disney just walked away from it. You guys have walked away from a lot of sports. So have sports costs peaked?

There's 2 things you live to regret, right, peaking the bottom in terms of -- peaking the floor for subscribers that have sports rights peaked. I think it will be more patchy and selective, right? The fantastic sports rights will continue to get strong bid. We feel -- we feel great about our portfolio because we've got great duration in the sports rights that we have, and we have great sports rights sort of with NFL, MLB, College Football, NASCAR, the list goes on, right. So I wouldn't say they've peaked, but I think that -- I think both sides are more value for -- the buyer and the seller are more value conscious now. And so -- but we feel pretty good about the balance that we have in our sports rights portfolio.

Got it. Thank you, Steve...

Thanks, Kannan. Thank you for having us.