As traditional media companies struggle to preserve the cable bundle, they appear to be shifting strategy to recreate it within the streaming landscape. This approach is central to Fox Corp.’s new Fox One service, which launched on August 21, bringing the company’s linear TV channels to a subscription streaming platform for the first time.
Priced at $20 per month, Fox One is being positioned not as a standalone essential but as a strategic addition to the existing streaming market. The service is already set to be bundled with ESPN’s new direct-to-consumer platform, launching October 2. The combined package will cost $40, a 20% discount compared to subscribing to both services separately for $50.
Reports suggest this is only the first step in Fox’s broader bundling ambitions. Pete Distad, the company’s direct-to-consumer chief, told the Los Angeles Times that Fox “will look at more opportunities to bundle Fox One with other streaming services.” Furthermore, sources at the company have indicated interest in packaging the service with nearly every major legacy media streamer, including Peacock and Paramount+.
This strategy makes sense, as Fox One’s primary appeal is as a complement to other platforms. For sports fans, its most compelling feature is that it helps complete the puzzle for comprehensive NFL coverage without a traditional pay-TV subscription, especially when paired with services like Peacock (home of Sunday Night Football) and Paramount+ (a fellow Sunday afternoon broadcaster).
While Fox One’s lineup is driven by sports content, including Fox News, its portfolio of rights is not the most dominant on its own. A surge in sign-ups is anticipated for next year’s FIFA World Cup, but forming alliances with other NFL broadcasters is the company’s most viable path to capturing widespread consumer attention.
This trend signifies a nuanced evolution in the media industry—not just a simple “rebundling,” but the migration of the linear television model into the streaming space. While there is still no single, cable-style package for all major streaming content, Fox One and ESPN’s upcoming service represent a new, higher-priced tier of streamers offering live content to cord-cutters.
With premium price points of $20 and $30 per month respectively, these services are carefully priced to avoid immediately cannibalizing the existing pay-TV audience. However, the economics are favorable for the companies; ESPN, for example, will earn significantly more from its $30 streaming fee than the reported $15-per-subscriber carriage fee it receives from cable providers for all its channels.
This transition comes as the linear TV audience continues to decline and pay-TV providers introduce “skinny bundles” that allow customers to drop expensive sports channels, further weakening the traditional business model. For ESPN, the direct-to-consumer service is a necessary pivot toward a post-cable future to maximize revenue in a contracting market.
Fox’s place in this future is less certain, which explains its reliance on a bundling strategy. The original pay-TV bundle forced consumers to pay for a wide array of channels, a model dismantled by the à la carte era of streaming. Fox is now betting that if its new service isn’t compelling enough to be a main draw, it can still succeed as an essential addition to someone else’s offering.
