Fox One debuted in late August and last week the Fox flagship streaming service sweetened its offer by officially launching a bundle that pairs it with Disney’s new ESPN Unlimited service for $40 per month.
Following the launch of Fox One, StreamTV Insider sat down with Amit Dudakia, SVP of Product at Fox One, to chat about user experience priorities out of the gate and what’s on deck as the media company makes a DTC play for cord-cutters and cord-nevers with its linear channels now available outside of the pay TV ecosystem.
Each Fox One and ESPN had respective streaming product launches on August 21 and as of October 2 they’re offering the two together at a discounted price of $39.99 per month ($10 less than purchasing both individually). It brings together services from two of the former partners of the defunct Venu Sports joint venture (the third partner was Warner Bros. Discovery), which never made it to market after a now-settled antitrust lawsuit brought on by Fubo.
Disney and Fox had prior plans to jointly offer an integrated streamer that incorporated the media companies’ respective sports channels but the new Fox One service - which in addition to sports includes Fox news and entertainment content - isn’t simply a recast of what was planned for Venu.
Not a Venu redo
When Venu dissolved in January Fox in February disclosed plans for its own DTC offering, which was purposely timed to try and launch ahead of college and NFL football this fall - but that meant a limited timeframe to get a product ready.
From the onset, Dudakia said many folks thought with work done for Venu one could easily repurpose it for Fox’s DTC and just “slap a new logo on it, ship it.” But “the reality is, it couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said.
Fox One did carry over a couple of elements from Venu – namely from a visual design perspective - that it felt was still compelling, but otherwise “everything under the hood is pretty much new,” he said.
Live content is at the center of the Fox One proposition, with programming spanning not only sports, but also news and entertainment. According to the SVP, that meant needing to think about consumers and building a product with the ability scale to accommodate different types of content.
One “table stakes” UX aspect he called out for a product surfacing different types of content is personalization.
“A news viewer expects to have a very different experience than a sports viewer does when they come into the product,” Dudakia said.
So Fox had to “go back to the drawing board and build our entire recommendations stack from the ground up instead of going with what we had originally ported over from the Venu days.”
Still it was a little prepared, as the playback experience and other Fox tech was “kept warm” to go direct-to-consumer, he noted, where the company was able to leverage some learnings from and tech used for its free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) service Tubi – which already proved sports streaming chops on a major stage with its successful live stream at scale of the 2025 Super Bowl.
But working on short timeline to launch, only so much that can be done, and Dudakia said his number one priority was to get the simple, foundational pieces in place and done really well. Meaning a ton of attention was poured into making live front and center of the UX but also ensuring Fox One can deliver low-latency, high-quality streams that support sports use cases as well as breaking news.
Feeling confident on that front, the team next tried to stretch itself to incorporate some innovative, as well as consumer-expected features to deliver a better live experience for viewers.
Emphasis on live, innovating on recaps, highlights and catch-ups
On that front, key Fox One features out of the gate Dudakia called out include Multiview, DVR and flexibility and choice around how to watch recorded content, where Fox has leaned into creating condensed games for people who missed an event to catch up.
Condensed games alongside a catch-up with highlights and recaps are three AI-powered features around live events on Fox One and which Dudakia views as unique.
In catch ups with highlights, Fox One creates one singular clip that dynamically updates throughout a game or event.
In part it’s about leaning into consumer behavior with clips and highlights, while also trying to make it a lean-back experience that uses technology to help take the work out for consumers and accelerate timeliness that’s all the more important when aligning with live events.
The way Fox views it, per Dudakia, is “how do we lean into some of these emerging technologies to not only allow us as a business to scale so that we can create all of these condensed games and recaps at volume across all of our events, but also be able to deliver them as quickly as possible to the end consumer.”
Some of Fox’s competitive set still use an editorial process around recaps, he noted. And while the SVP thinks there’s something magical around the human touch, he said Fox has made “quite a bit of headway” in terms of its ability to create and package up key live events moments using AI, adding “this is just the beginning.”
“We’re obviously continuously working to improve our models that we have to identify these moments and how we’re categorizing these moments, and so you’ll continue to see it evolve in terms of quality over time,” he commented.
And with a wide breadth of live content, it’s about pre-event, the event coverage itself and post-event – where Fox One wants to wrap content around its live programming and provide it to consumers in multiple ways.
Extending to Shorts feature
It’s using the same models leveraged for condensed games and recaps to help with another user feature – a vertical video mobile feed dubbed Shorts that’s also meant to cater to younger audiences and the Fox One target of cord-cutters and cord-nevers.
Younger generations aren’t necessarily watching full live games anymore and are getting a lot of sports content from social and in real-time, a factor that provided inspiration for the Shorts experience.
“If we know we’re going after an audience of cord cutters and cord nevers who are, generally speaking, getting their live event coverage in different forms through social, how do we replicate that in some way and make it even better,” Dudakia described in building the Fox One UX.
Complementary experiences are part of the picture for the platform, but he sees second-screen and mobile experiences as a “discovery engine, more than anything,” providing a vehicle to drive consumers into live events and longer form content.
“I don’t necessarily see it as a way to replace viewing the live event that you care about. I actually think it’s more of a pathway for users to discover new content and actually drive more engagement,” he said of the vertical video feature, where he said a sports fan could get awareness about an upcoming event through talking heads commentary.
Or, for example, if there’s a game on during the weekend but a user doesn’t have time to watch a full take from commentators.
“But if I can see a quick, short segment around a matchup that helps drive some interest, I would say Shorts is doing its job,” Dudakia said. “It’s allowing users to get into that content. They’re getting awareness.”
He thinks that element can extend into entertainment and news as well to provide users bite-sized pieces of content and drive them to other programming they might not have otherwise known about or watched.
Signposting live events for users, work ahead
The current consumer sports viewing experience is known to be frustrating and fragmented. With Fox One’s emphasis on live content, ensuring users know where and when game action is happening and getting them into the programming quickly is a key UX focus.
And with Fox’s bounty of sports rights, signposting to users and giving them indications to drive that tune-in is key.
“I think it’s so critical to educate customers around what the events are that are coming up and what’s on the service,” Dudakia noted, saying there’s going to be a lot of continued work in that regard.
Already it’s been thinking about unique ways to promote content, like allowing users to get into short-form video that’s associated with events as well as insights and analysis from its commentary shows. Some efforts will be typical tactics like push email, but Dudakia said the platform will also start leaning into building out its search experience which it’s “very, very bullish” about.
UX-wise, the search experience is what Dudakia is personally most excited for. Search will become more pronounced in the platform and touch different aspects – helped by further integration with Perplexity that’s already available on mobile to provide users with genAI-powered summaries.
He sees potential for a Copilot-like conversational experiences that gets users into content as quickly as possible, lets them know what events are on that night, provides education or additional context around athletes, teams or other content elements and is hyper personalized.
“We’re going to start to make that more prominent and pervasive throughout the entire experience for a user,” he said of search experiences.
For example, if a user sees an event and wants to learn more about it very quickly, they can do so and see all of the related video or content that’s available as well as contextual actions like being able to set a reminder for the event, get a notification or set it to record – aspects Fox One is currently exploring now.
The future vision of search on Fox One also involves lending itself to complementary second-screen experiences like stats, sports betting, and fantasy integrations – all of which it’s having active conversations around today, per the SVP.
Down the line Dudakia expects users to be able to have very situationally aware, conversational exchanges on the streamer, where users could quickly query the platform for stats or even predictive insights as part of a second-scene experience.
Potential for multiple subscriptions
When it comes to the pairing of ESPN and Fox One, Dudakia previously noted the latter has been built to handle multiple subscriptions (such as Fox Nation or B10+) and while many other discussions would need to happen, is capable of supporting further integrations.
Asked about building Fox One for multiple subscriptions and if the vision is an Amazon Channels-like store, Dudakia didn’t confirm any plans but suggested the company is open to the possibility or other types of third-party subscription integrations
“I think longer term strategy around this is that, there’s still a lot of discussions that need to happen, but from a technology perspective we’ve sort of set ourselves up to go down that path if there was ever another subscription or a partner that we wanted to engage with.”
He noted Roku, Amazon and YouTube all have their own subscription channel businesses but there’s also a consumer desire for integrated streaming experiences, where “they just want to have a consolidated way to consume all their content, and there’s just so much fragmentation.”
Separately, early data from research firm Antenna found that in the first 10 days after launch, Amazon Prime Video Channels marketplace accounted for nearly 60% of Fox One signups.
Although Dudakia didn’t rule it out a channels store as a possibility in the future, he acknowledged a lot of due diligence would need to be done – adding that Fox built the platform to support multiple subscriptions – and potentially going a step further beyond just access to third-party subscriptions to actually ingest content from others – but emphasized that’s not to say it’s something Fox will actually do.
Still, “it’s something that we’re certainly having discussions around,” he noted, adding others in the space have discussed the idea as well, including ESPN mentioning the possibility of “being open to potentially going down the path of ingesting content.”
“So I would say it’s like we’re sort of in the same boat. But there’s a lot of other shoes to drop,” Dudakia added.
Right now ESPN and Fox One are simply separate services offered at a discount together and haven’t said there plans to integrate further, although some execs have made comments about creating connection points between the two subscriptions for consumers.
As Josh Lasker, SVP of ESPN DTC told Deadline, the companies see their sports rights and services as complementary rather than overlapping, so it made a lot of sense to bundle. Both hold major rights like NFL and MLB, as well as college sports, while ESPN also has NBA, WNBA, WWE and Fox has NHL and FIFA World Cup 2026, among several other sports rights.
Tony Billeter, SVP of Strategy & Business Development for Fox One, also noted to Deadline that there was an existing relationship and some technology enablement already in place to help quickly bring to the bundle offer to market in what looks to be just the first phase of a longer collaboration between ESPN and Fox.
“We’re going to rapidly test and learn how to create the connection points for consumers, both from a marketing and from a subscription perspective,” Billeter told Deadline about the two services.
Disney has already shown the power of the bundle with its own streaming services and is currently integrating Hulu within Disney+ for a unified one-app experience.
Early Shorts engagement on Fox One
As for uptake and engagement of Fox One, just a couple of short weeks after the August launch, Dudakia told StreamTV Insider that no launch is 100% smooth and Fox One had been aware of and tackling initial issues quickly. But early on, he said, “we’re really happy” with engagement on the platform and that live is clearly king, which is where the primary viewership has been initially.
It’s also seeing “some promising engagement with Shorts as well,” which is currently in beta phase – but one where Fox is keen to see viewership engagement attributes within Fox One power users.
“We’re seeing higher retention around that cohort of users, seeing more, increased viewing time,” he said. “So engagement’s been really fantastic, but we think that’s just really sort of the start.”