This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series →
This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how Fox One represents the state of ad-supported streaming products.
Fox’s flagship streaming service Fox One doesn’t only symbolize the state of the TV and streaming market, by making traditional TV’s most premium programming, NFL football, fully available without a pay-TV subscription. It also represents the state of streaming technology.
Yes, I’m referring to AI, which Fox is using to power the streaming service’s search engine and customer support. But I’m also talking about how Fox is unifying its streaming ad tech stack around a proprietary ad server to consolidate its streaming ad inventory – which also includes Tubi and Fox Nation – into a single point-of-sale. And how by early next year Fox plans to add dynamic ad insertion capabilities to Fox One to enable advertisers to carve up their own ad placements to deliver targeted creative to specific audience segments and to allow Fox to slice up a given ad slot to sell to multiple advertisers.
And that’s not to mention the fact that Fox One launched across 12 different platforms. “Thirteen if you include Amazon Prime Video Channels, which was a deal we did directly with Amazon,” said John Fiedler, evp of product and engineering at Fox Corporation, on stage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami last week.
Fiedler wouldn’t say how many subscribers Fox One has accrued since debuting on Aug. 21 – “it has beat our expectations,” he said – but he did delve into the technology underpinning the streamer and the company’s plans to further develop the product.
For example, Fox plans to introduce chat-driven search within Fox One that would be powered by AI. People could still search by inputting simple keywords like “NFL,” or they could submit a prompt like “What are the best NFL games today?”
“We think that having almost like a copilot/companion-style experience – maybe with search as the leading entry point to that but maybe it’s also built into the rest of the experience – we think that is ultimately powerful and consumers will get more and more adjusted to that over time, Fiedler said.
To be clear, AI is already part of the Fox One product. It has a feature called Shorts that uses AI to create vertical video clips from live programs. And it has an AI-powered customer support feature that uses technology from AI customer service provider Sierra.
“You basically create a knowledge base like you would on a Salesforce platform, and it’s questions and answers. So you feed all of that information into this AI. It trains itself on that, and then it just knows how to then answer people’s queries in natural language based off the information that it’s learned from your knowledge base,” said Fiedler. Fox can also notify the AI when there are time-sensitive issues, such as a technical outage, so that it can handle the inevitable onslaught on customer service messages regarding the outage.
“It’s almost like a god mode,” Fiedler said.
Speaking of the almighty – in what may be the most sacrilegious segue I could write – a major part of Fox’s plans is unifying its streaming product portfolio, including Fox One, around a proprietary ad server.
“What we’re doing is taking the ad tech out of Tubi the platform – it’s called AdRise from a branding perspective – and we’re extending that into Fox One. And we’re taking all of the user signals and personalization work that we’re doing with AI and also pushing that into the ad server as well,” Fiedler said.
Disney has been doing something similar in unifying its respective streaming inventory around Hulu’s ad server. That has allowed Disney to not only sell its streaming ad inventory in a single pool to advertisers but also to provide the same targeting capabilities across its streaming services. Having a single back-end infrastructure has also enabled Disney to make more of its streaming ad inventory available for purchase programmatically.
“That’s how you’re going to drive the most scale with advertisers is being able to go out to the marketplace and sell your entire audience, your entire portfolio through a single buy,” Fiedler said.
Another selling point will be Fox’s ability to dynamically insert ads, a capability that the comp