Lachlan Murdoch brags about Fox Corp. demanding the “highest price increases” for affiliate fees in cable

Lachlan Murdoch brags about Fox Corp. demanding the "highest price increases" for affiliate fees in cable

Audio file

Citation From the May 17, 2023 edition of the SVB MoffettNathanson Inaugural Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference

ROBERT FISHMAN (MOFFETTNATHANSON): Anything more you can talk about, that pricing increase that you are getting maybe ahead of your expectations that you mentioned to offset what we all know that the higher levels of cord cutting?

LACHLAN MURDOCH: So on the pricing, we mentioned a few minutes ago, we are one year into a three year cycle, right, where we renew all of our distributors, and what we're seeing in that cycle is we're absolutely -- we've set a price both for retransmission and our cable channels in the market that exceeds our expectations. So we are driving I think best in class pricing increases and our brands, because of where we sit in the ecosystem, we talked about, that's what gives us the ability to do that.

On the -- so 100% we are best in class premium pricing. What happens in the cable ecosystem overall, obviously we're seeing declines over 7%, that’s something we can’t -- we can't control that side of the ledger but absolutely within that we can garner the highest price increases.

Previous reporting indicates that Fox News is pushing an aggressive strategy to raise revenue by increasing the fee paid by cable and satellite providers to $3 per subscriber. To learn more about Media Matters' No Fox Fee campaign, click here.