Fox Sports Australia Media Man Australia

Fox Sports Australia

Fox Sports is an Australian group of sports channels. They are owned by the Premier Media Group, which is in turn owned by News Corporation, and Publishing and Broadcasting Limited. Its main competitor is ESPN, which has little local content. News Corporation also controls Fox Sports (USA) and the main pay-television sports network in the United Kingdom, Sky Sports.

Although it shares the "Fox" name, Fox Sports is not affiliated with the now defunct Fox Footy Channel, which was operated by Foxtel until its closing at 4am on October 1, 2006.

History

Fox Sports started life as the Premier Sports Network (later just 'Premier Sports') on Australia's first pay-television service, Galaxy. Premier Sports' backers included American company Prime International, which was later to become part of Liberty Media.

The service started in January 1995 in Sydney and made a name for itself, securing the rights to Australia's cricket tour of the West Indies. Previously Australian cricket tours had been covered on the Nine Network on free-to-air, and Nine tried to stop the broadcast under Australia's 'anti-siphoning' rules, which state that certain popular sporting events cannot be screened exclusively on pay television. PSN signed a deal with Network Ten to share the broadcast rights.

When Foxtel launched its cable service later that year, PSN was included as part of the package.

Since 1995, Fox Sports has been airing National Basketball League (NBL) games.

On March 1, 1996, PSN was relaunched as Fox Sports Australia, to coincide with the new Super 12 rugby union competition and the proposed launch of the Super League.

In 1997 a secondary channel was launched on Foxtel to carry broadcasts of the new National Rugby League competition. Fox Sports and its chief competitor, Sports Australia shared the rights to NRL broadcasts as a result of the legal settlement in the Super League war. The channel on Foxtel was later relaunched as Fox Sports Two, at first broadcasting from Friday through Monday each week, and later expanding to a full 24-hour, 7-day service.

When Optus Vision dropped the C7 Sport service in March 2002, they started carrying the Fox Sports channels. These were referred to by Optus as "Optus Sports 1" and "Optus Sports 2" in Optus promotional material; on-air programming referred to the channels as simply "Sports One" and "Sports Two", although programming such as the nightly Fox Sports News bulletins retained the Fox name. Optus dropped the "Optus Sports" name in October 2002.

Fox Sports Two is generally used to cover bigger events that require large amounts of air time, such as the 1998 Winter Olympics, Grand Slam tennis tournaments, and the 2004 European Football Championship.

During the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Fox Sports carried an additional eight channels dedicated to Games events. These were available to customers at an additional charge.

Fox Sports 3 is used for high rating sports broadcasts, such as the National Rugby League and Cricket. National Rugby League is the highest rating sport on Fox Sports, usually topping Pay TV ratings every week.

Fox Sports has being the exclusive broadcastor of the Hyundai A-League since its first season in 2005. And in 2006, an A$ 120m deal between the FFA and Fox Sports was reached in after the end of the first season. Under the deal, Fox Sports will have exclusive rights from 2007 to all Socceroos home internationals, all A-League and Asian Cup fixtures, World Cup qualifiers through the AFC, and all AFC Champions League matches. As part of the deal Fox Sports (and Foxtel) agreed to only call the world game by its proper name, football (rather than the American term - Soccer).

The deal to cover the A-league live and exclusive has already reaped big rewards for Fox Sports, its ratings were very strong in the 2006-2007 season and the 2007 A-league grand final became (at the time) Fox Sports highest ever rating event.[2]

Ratings for football (soccer) have generally been very good. The Socceroos first game of the 2007 AFC Asian Cup, attracted 345,000 viewers[3], while their Quarter final drew an average of 419,000[4] - an all time record for Australian Pay TV.

In 2007, Fox Sports reached a deal to broadcast 4 games live and exclusive from the AFL each week. This includes the exclusive only Sunday twilight match. In addition they will broadcast Friday night games live into New South Wales and Queensland via channel 518- normally used for pay-per-view service Main Event. When channel 518 is used in this way it is promoted as Fox Sports Plus on-air.

The channel is being used increasingly to show live events when Fox Sports has a clash involving its main 3 channels - for example on Saturday 17th of March, 2007 Fox Sports broadcast a match from the 2007 Cricket World Cup (Ireland v Pakistan) live on 518 - as it was committed to Football, Rugby Union and another cricket match on its main 3 channels.

Channels

* Fox Sports 1
* Fox Sports 2
* Fox Sports 3
* Fox Sports Plus (Used for Friday Night AFL in Sydney / Brisbane and Saturday Nights in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. It was also used nationwide for a Socceroos game in June 2007. And often when English Premier League has multiple games on the one night.)
* FoxSportsNews
* FUEL TV
* Fox Sports HD (Launches June 2008)

Programming

Original programming

* AFL Teams
* The Back Page
* Before the Bounce
* Inside Cricket
* Inside Rugby
* Inside Speed
* NBL Wrap
* NRL on Fox
* NRL Teams
* On the Couch
* PGA Golf Show
* S14 Extra Time
* The Winners
* Total Football

Website

Profiles

News

Mediaman does not represent Fox Sports Australia