Foxnet

~ the eulogy ~

Foxnet was not a cable channel in the ordinary sense. It was a broadcast network delivered as one, assembled for the parts of the United States where Fox could not get on the air at all.

The problem was arithmetic. When Fox launched in October 1986 it took whatever station was available in each market, which in big cities meant the highest-rated independent. Smaller markets often had three commercial stations or fewer, all of them already taken by the established networks, and the leftovers were low-power outlets running home shopping or religious broadcasters who would block parts of the schedule. Fox mostly declined those options, so by 1991 the network reached 91 percent of American households with a television, the lowest figure among the four largest networks.

Jamie Kellner, the network's first president, called the holes white areas and proposed filling them from the satellite instead of the tower. On 6 September 1990 Fox signed Tele-Communications Inc., then the largest cable operator in the country, to carry a cable-only version of the network. John Malone, running TCI at the time, called the deal precedent setting, because it let a cable system hold network affiliate status in a place where the network had no station. Foxnet launched on 6 June 1991 out of the Fox Network Center in Century City, with an East and a West feed.

~ the dossier ~

~ a hundred dollars a year ~

The money moved in two directions. Fox charged a small cable provider a flat annual carriage fee of one hundred dollars for the whole service, where other networks billed monthly per subscriber, and TCI paid Fox six cents per subscriber per month going the other way. That second number was the unusual one. Money flowing from the carrier to the network was a precursor to the reverse compensation arrangements that Fox and the other broadcasters pushed onto their conventional affiliates by the early 2000s.

What went out on the feed was Fox's own programming, the children's block included, padded out with a master schedule of syndicated and brokered shows because the network itself only programmed a few hours a night in that era. Local operators got no window of their own. The service looked like a cable channel and carried nothing local at all.

~ down to thirteen thousand ~

It died of its own success, slowly. Every year a few more small markets got a real Fox affiliate over the air, or a cable system imported one from the next market over, and the territory that needed a national feed shrank. By 2006 Foxnet survived on a handful of cable systems, none of them with more than a thousand subscribers, and News Corporation decided the economics no longer worked.

The shutdown was scheduled for 1 September 2006 and then pushed back eleven days. Two stations needed the time: WABG-TV in Greenwood, Mississippi, an ABC affiliate, and WAGM-TV in Presque Isle, Maine, a CBS affiliate, were both standing up Fox affiliates on their second digital subchannels. Foxnet went off on 12 September 2006. An estimated 13,000 cable subscribers lost access to Fox programming that day, out of a country where the network now reached 98.97 percent of television households.

~ what it taught the industry ~

Kellner left Fox in 1993 to co-found The WB, and took the idea with him. The WB 100+ Station Group, running from September 1998 to September 2006, applied the same concept to the same gap, with one change: local operators were allowed to brand the service as their own station, and some of them put local news on it. The CW Plus took over that model when The WB and UPN merged into The CW in September 2006, the same month Foxnet went dark.

The name came back too, in a smaller form. Since 2017 Fox has at times fed a generic national signal, labeled Foxnet on some program guides, to streaming distributors whose markets lack an affiliate deal and to cable systems whose local station is off the air after storm damage. It exists to cover a gap for a few hours or a few weeks at a time, and there is nothing to subscribe to.

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