Any investor hoping to ask about Fox’s pending Roku acquisition during its fiscal Q1 2027 earnings call on Monday was out of luck.

Fox’s IR rep made that clear up front and pointed analysts to Fox’s SEC filings instead.

However, CEO Lachlan Murdoch did share a mini update, including that shareholder and foreign regulatory approvals are in, although Fox is still working with the DOJ on antitrust clearance.

“[We] expect to close the transaction as soon as we can,” Murdoch told investors, noting that Fox’s conviction in the opportunity has only grown. Pairing Roku’s platform with Fox’s sports, news and entertainment content is a good recipe for building our position in the fastest-growing segments of the media landscape, he said.

Fox’s revenue rose 22% to $4.6 billion in the quarter, including a 47% jump in advertising revenue (60% in its TV segment) driven by the World Cup, early midterm spending and Tubi, its free ad-supported streaming service.

Tubi is a tailwind

Tubi grew revenue 35% year over year, alongside a 23% uptick in total view time. Fox attributed that engagement to a combo of Tubi’s content library, 10 new originals and a World Cup hub, which drew on Fox’s US English-language rights to the tournament. Tubi also got a boost from viral content from more than 600 creators. Its Tubi for Creators program launched in 2025 with six creators and has since wooed big YouTube names like MrBeast and Jomboy Media.

And profits are growing, too, despite higher content costs, according to CFO Steve Tomsic, who noted that Tubi is contributing more to the bottom line than it was in the year-ago quarter when it turned its first profit – a development Murdoch himself apparently didn’t see coming.

A Bank of America analyst on the call reminded Murdoch that a year or so ago he’d said that Tubi’s growth, then in the midteens, wouldn’t be sustainable. “I don’t remember saying that, but I’m sure I did … Thank you for calling me out on that one,” Murdoch said, adding that Tubi’s profit margins should settle in the 20% range once it reaches further maturity.

Advertising is the main engine behind Tubi’s momentum, which Murdoch said is continuing into the current quarter. Tubi’s audience is young, diverse and mostly cord-free, he said, which is like catnip for advertisers. “They’re a very hard market for advertisers to reach,” he said, which, in a midterm year, is a pretty good pitch to political campaigns.

That midterm money

Fox booked more than $350 million in political ads this cycle, and Tubi was responsible for roughly $50 million of that. Most of the rest – $250 million-plus – went to Fox’s local stations, including many in battleground states, where demand is so high that some stations run out of ad inventory. The remaining $50-ish million went to political ads across national sports, news and entertainment.

But if you squint, and not that hard, Tubi also kind of counts as local advertising in Murdoch’s view. “It’s effectively local revenue because it’s targeted,” he said.

Politics aside, sports has been a tailwind, too.

The FIFA World Cup final was the most-watched soccer telecast in US history; the World Series, which aired on Fox, averaged 12 million viewers; and Fox’s NFL “America’s Game of the Week” is drawing an average of nearly 25 million viewers per game.

But Murdoch was also careful to temper expectations for Fox One, Fox’s streaming service for Fox content. Yes, subscriber acquisitions were up more than 30% in September on Fox One versus the start of last year’s football season, and roughly 97% of new subscribers don’t have a cable subscription. But “is Fox One always going to be able to supplant some of the subscriber losses in the traditional ecosystem?” Murdoch said. “Probably not, as sports seasons come and go.”

It’s not like there’s a World Cup every year – or a midterm election.

“It’s always a point in time,” Murdoch said. “Every couple years, you’ve got to be careful to understand the strength of the political cycle.”

Fox News, fatigued

And not everything at Fox was a win this past quarter, no matter how you spin it.

Fox News finished its fiscal Q1 as the most-watched cable news network, with 2.1 million primetime viewers and 1.3 million across all dayparts. But those figures were down 17% and 16% year over year, according to Nielsen, and Fox News was the only major cable news network to see declines. The slide has continued into October, when total-day ratings fell 27% ahead of the midterms.

Murdoch blamed tough comps against last year’s tremendous news cycle, which included the inauguration, Charlie Kirk’s assassination and DOGE-related drama. He compared this cycle to the 2006 midterms, when a second-term president was halfway through his term.

It’s not that viewers are defecting to CNN or MS Now, he said. They’re just fatigued and watching slightly less television overall. (Even so, Nielsen does show CNN and MS Now both up from last year.)

Meanwhile, cable advertising rose 8%, helped along by sports, but digital news ad revenue fell. Asked about that – we mourn you preemptively, open web – Murdoch pointed to Fox News Digital’s standing as the top news site in the US and called digital news a hyper-competitive market.