Fox One Wins Big in Year One
This story was originally featured in CFX: The Magazine‘s latest Top Ops issue, where Fox One was awarded Streaming Innovation of the Year. To read the full magazine, check out the digital edition here or visit the Top Ops website.
Fox One has had quite the freshman year. Not only did Fox Corp.’s direct-to-consumer streaming service launch in time for the NFL season last fall, but it also served as the English-language streaming home of the 2026 FIFA World Cup this past summer. It pulled out all the stops for the world’s biggest sporting event, rolling out a slew of advanced viewing, personalization and content discovery features, including customizable multiview, AI-powered search, key plays and more.
Delivering a great World Cup experience is what really got the Fox One team excited, says Fox DTC EVP, Product and Engineering John Fiedler, reflecting on the service’s major milestones so far. “Once you have the product out in market, you’re obviously getting a lot of feedback. You’re seeing how consumers behave, and then you can start to be really innovative,” he says. “For launch, our mission was to get a product in market that was working and could process commerce transactions at scale and support usage during NFL season, the nuts and bolts of what you would expect a streaming product to need to be. But World Cup was the fun stuff. That was the innovative stuff.”
The results were worth the effort. The World Cup drove incremental subscriber acquisition and strong retention rates that surpassed Fox’s expectations, and according to research firm Antenna, Fox One received 2.8 million signups in June, with opening day alone raking in 400,000 new subs. Most importantly, the wins aren’t negatively impacting Fox’s pay TV business—an industry concern whenever a programmer launches a DTC service. The minimal cannibalization comes down to partnering with pay TV partners to make the service available to cable customers at no additional cost and making the authentication process as simple as possible.
“It’s a huge understated part of the product that deserves more attention. The public perception of the product is about cord cutters, cord nevers and how we’re sort of filling that need in the marketplace, but the product was intentionally built to support the existing cable audience,” Fiedler says. “From one business perspective, we’re looking at how many acquisitions did we get, how many commerce transactions did we process. But we’re also very much looking at the amount of cable customers that we’re driving into the experience to help also support those partnerships.”
As another NFL season kicks off and the midterm elections draw near, Fiedler and his team are looking forward to continuing to build on the foundation they set in year one. For election coverage on the streamer, Fiedler is thinking about how to present an interactive real-time data component next to a live video stream in multiview, calling it “the next fun product challenge.”
“We’re trying to make the product as engaging as we possibly can. There’s still such a high ceiling on where we could take live viewing experiences using technology today, and building experiences that feel genuinely interactive, personalized, built for you, allow you to catch up on the things you care about and get into product experiences that are much more dynamic and unique and compelling than what has traditionally been put into the market to this point.”
Fast Facts
- Fox One streamed all 104 matches of the 2026 World Cup live and on-demand in 4K. The final drew 38.9M viewers on FOX—the most-watched soccer telecast in U.S. history.
- Fox One added popular podcasts from FOX News Media and Red Seat Ventures this year, including “Hang Out with Sean Hannity,” “Ruthless,” “The Riley Gaines Show,” “The Brett Cooper Show” and “Kill Tony.”