Future of TV Briefing: How Fox is using AI and a unified ad server to power-up Fox One

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 company plans to add to Fox One “around January,” Fiedler said. Typically, when a company like Fox is simulcasting a program such as an NFL game across traditional TV and streaming, it is running the same ads on both, a practice commonly referred to as “linear passthrough.” DAI, however, enables ads to be sold and inserted on the fly so that an advertiser could run different creative to different audiences or so that Fox could sell the same slot to different advertisers aiming for specific audience segments.

A concern ad buyers have had with adopting DAI for live programs like NFL games is the potential for it to introduce latency. Even if it only adds milliseconds to make the server call for the ad to be inserted on the fly, those milliseconds can add up to someone’s ad eventually being cut off or the live stream being delayed long enough for a game’s outcome to be spoiled for audiences by social media. Which is definitely something Fiedler and his team are working through ahead of the DAI launch to determine how to be able to offset that latency during a live event so it doesn’t accumulate. And it helps that Fox has already proven adept at mitigating latency at a large scale.

“We streamed the Super Bowl on [Tubi] for this past Super Bowl, and we had tons of measuring going on around latency. And we were even beating [the] over-the-air [broadcast delivery], which is crazy in terms of getting that digital distribution as close to real time as possible,” Fiedler said.

What we’ve heard

“I only do [programmatic guaranteed] deals right now. That’s because I like to control things, and direct deals are very advantageous otherwise.”

– Agency executive on why they don’t buy streaming ads through programmatic private marketplaces

Numbers to know

5: Number of days after Disney pulled “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air that the company announced the late-night talk show’s return.

6.1%: Percentage increase in ad spend against late-night TV shows in the first half of 2025 compared to the first half of 2024.

183 million: Number of monthly active users in the U.S. that TikTok has in August, per Similarweb.

$22-24: The per-share price that Paramount Skydance is reportedly planning to offer to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.

$7 billion: How much revenue Versant’s assets generated in 2024 compared to $7.4 billion the year prior.

What we’ve covered

LinkedIn algorithm tweaks lead to views slump for some creators:

• Some creators have seen declines in video impressions in the second half of 2025 compared to the first half of the year.
• LinkedIn has tweaked its video distribution strategy to aim videos at more specific audiences versus blasting them across the platform.

Read more about LinkedIn here.

The Sun doubles video’s share of digital revenue to 18% by betting on original programming:

• Original shows account for nearly a third of the publisher’s video revenue.
• The Sun has debuted 15 original shows since January.

Read more about The Sun’s video revenue here.

Sports rights owners are embracing YouTube creators as their next media partners:

• Sports leagues are enlisting creators to promote their events.
• Some are allowing YouTube creators to syndicate games, while others are giving creators credentials to attend.

Read more about sports creators here.

What we’re reading

The deal with the TikTok U.S deal:

If you’ve been struggling to keep up with the deal that the U.S. government has negotiated with China to create a U.S. version of the app, you’re not alone. Luckily, The Wall Street Journal has published this piece breaking down the details.

Disney’s decision on Kimmel:

The reasons behind Disney’s decision to pull “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off-air are numerous, but they include pressure from local TV stations owners Nexstar and Sinclair and threats being made against Disney employees, according to The New York Times. ESPN’s pending deal to sell a stake to the NFL in exchange for the league’s media properties — which would need regulatory approval — likely also played a part.

Trump’s threat against broadcast TV networks:

The president of the United States has floated the idea of revoking broadcast licenses from TV networks that are critical of him, according to Morning Brew.

MrBeast’s children’s privacy problem:

The Children’s Advertising Review Unit has accused the YouTube star’s website of collecting children’s personal information without proper controls, including parental consent mechanisms, according to Adweek.

OpenAI’s video copyright concerns:

The Washington Post has used OpenAI’s Sora AI video generation tool to create videos that closely resemble existing programs, like Netflix’s “Wednesday,” which suggests OpenAI trained the tool on existing shows and movies, per the Post.

NFL viewership questions:

Nielsen’s big data plus panel measured a surprisingly large audience for Fox’s Eagles-Chiefs game, which raises further questions regarding how reliable the measurement system is, according to Sportico.