Fox Chairman doesn’t have regulatory approval concerns for sports JV

Lachlan Murdoch, Chairman of the Board of Fox Corp. (FOXA), stated when asked at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference about thoughts or concerns about regulatory approval for the company’s recent sports streaming joint venture with Disney’s (DIS) ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD): “Look, I think this is a — the answer is no. I don’t think — we don’t have any concerns from a regulatory approval perspective. When you look at the service, it’s pro consumer, it’s pro competition. It’s focused on a cohort of people on a segment that is not just — it’s not just underserved, it’s not served at all with sports content. And that’s quite incredible because if you think about the sports universe in this country, obviously, the U.S. is different from other countries. It’s probably the most complex sports rights market in the world because you have national sports packages, you have regional sports packages, you’ve got cable packages, and you’ve got — you’ve got paper you obviously, you’ve got broadcast packages. But all of those, at the very top of that, you’ve got Sunday Ticket, a very premium service. So all segments at the top end, right, the top 50% of households are served incredibly well. But this 50% of households at the bottom that aren’t served at all. And I just don’t believe that they’re not sports fans or there aren’t a lot of sports fans in that cohort. So we want to serve that part of the market that’s not served today. There’s no competition in that market today, and we want to do it in a very pro-consumer, consumer-first manner. And so we think for all those reasons, we — I’m not overly concerned about the regulatory environment.”