Seeing Riches in Sports TV Fox Will Create New Network On Tuesday, Fox announces its intention to start Fox Sports 1, an all-sports network, in August. The channel will carry Nascar races, Major League Baseball games, college basketball and football, soccer and U.F.C. fights. It will also broadcast studio shows, including one that is to be hosted by Regis Philbin, a celebrated Notre Dame fan. Murdoch’s effort is a long shot to topple ESPN, or at least take a huge bite out of it. One way to measure Fox Sports 1’s future success will be how many subscribers it gets and the subscriber fees it can accumulate. Fox has spent months working to convert Speed, a motorsports-centric network with 81 million subscribers, to Fox Sports 1. A companion service, Fox Sports 2, will replace another niche channel, Fuel. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/s...-can-challenge-espn.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&
The Fox Sports 1 Plan: Bundle Broadcast Rights Deals, Make Pay TV Customers Foot The Bill The two national Fox Sports networks should successfully shift the costs of all those sports contracts — including one deal for a game on their over-the-air network — onto every pay TV subscriber in America. This new national network is more, though, than just a simple money grab. Fox has one reason for thrusting a national sports channel on us now: to consolidate all of its non-NFL sports properties and shift the costs of all those contracts — including that shiny new 12-year, $500 million deal with the reconfigured Big East — to consumers. http://www.whatyoupayforsports.com/2013/04/the-fox-sports-1-plan/