Fox Sports (Australia)

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Fox Sports
Launched	19th February 1996
Owned by	Premier Media Group
Audience share	0.6% (Nov '05, [1])
Website	www.foxsports.com.au
Availability
Satellite
Foxtel Digital	Fox Sports 1: Channel 501 Fox Sports 2: Channel 502 Fox Sports 3: Channel 503 Fox Sports News: Channel 513 Fuel TV: Channel 516
Austar Digital	Fox Sports 1: Channel 501 Fox Sports 2: Channel 502 Fox Sports 3: Channel 503 Fox Sports News: Channel 513 Fuel TV: Channel 516
Cable
Foxtel Digital	Fox Sports 1: Channel 501 Fox Sports 2: Channel 502 Fox Sports 3: Channel 503 Fox Sports News: Channel 513 Fuel TV: Channel 516
Austar Digital	Fox Sports 1: Channel 501 Fox Sports 2: Channel 502 Fox Sports 3: Channel 503 Fox Sports News: Channel 513 Fuel TV: Channel 516
Optus TV Featuring Foxtel Digital	Fox Sports 1: Channel 501 Fox Sports 2: Channel 502 Fox Sports 3: Channel 503 Fox Sports News: Channel 513 Fuel TV: Channel 516

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.

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.

[edit] 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.

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 historic 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 Fox Sports highest ever rating event.^[1]

In 2007, Fox Sports reached a landmark deal to broadcast 4 games live and exclusive from the AFL each week. In addition they will broadcast Friday night games live into New South Wales and Queensland via channel 518 (Mainevent Channel). 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.

[edit] Fox Sports News

Morning News intro on Fox Sports News.

Fox Sports News channel launched on October 1, 2006. The channel runs live for 19 hours a day, broadcasting sports news. Initially, for 6 hours a day (midnight - 6am AEST) the channel would broadcast Sky Sports News live from the UK, similar to the setup of Australian News channel Sky News Australia. Now this timeslot is occupied by Fox Sports News Overnight which runs a loop of the news of the day beginning at 1am AEST.

[edit] Channels

• Fox Sports 1
• Fox Sports 2
• Fox Sports 3
• Fox Sports News
• Fuel TV

[edit] Sports/competitions that Fox Sports owns broadcast rights to (in 2007)

[edit] AFL (Australian Rules football)

• Australian Football League (4 Exclusively Live matches each round, along with replays/highlights of all matches)

[edit] Basketball

• National Basketball League (Usually two matches per week live)
• National Basketball Association (Usually two matches per week live)

[edit] Cricket

• 2007 Cricket World Cup (All matches Live)
• International Test Cricket
• One-day Internationals
• Ford Ranger One Day Cup (Usually two to three games live each week)
• Pura Cup (Final Only)
• KFC Twenty20 Big Bash (Most Games live)

[edit] Football

• A-League (All games live)
• A-league Finals Series (All games live)
• Asian Champions League (All games involving Australian teams live)
• Asian Cup (All Australian games live, plus live coverage of selected other games)
• Socceroos internationals (All games excluding FIFA World Cup Finals games)
• English Football League Cup (Live coverage from Quarter Finals onwards)
• English Football League Championship (Live coverage of 1-2 games a week plus highlights show)
• English Premier League (Live coverage of 6-8 games a week)
• Scottish FA Cup (Live coverage of Semis and Final)

[edit] Golf

• American PGA Tour (All rounds)
• European PGA Tour

[edit] Gridiron

• National Football League (2-3 games a week)

[edit] Motorsport

• Superbike World Championship (Most races live)
• MotoGP (All races live)
• NASCAR (Busch Series and Nextel Cup)
• A1 Grand Prix (Most races live)

[edit] Netball

• Tasman Trophy Netball League in 2008 (Coverage of all games confirmed)

[edit] Rugby League

• National Rugby League (5 games a week live and Exclusive)
• Super League
• Challenge Cup

[edit] Rugby Union

• Super 14 (All games live and exclusive)
• Tri Nations Series
• Wallabies internationals
• Currie Cup
• Air New Zealand Cup

[edit] Tennis

• ATP Masters Series
• Australian Open
• Roland Garros
• The Championships at Wimbledon
• US Open

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Fox Sports (USA)

[edit] External links

• Fox Sports Australia Web Page
• Announcement of Fox Sports 3