Fox Corp. is finally getting into the direct-to-consumer streaming game.

The company known for its news and sports TV content said Tuesday it’s aiming to launch a subscription streaming service by the end of the year.

The streaming service is not meant to upend Fox’s place in the traditional bundle, CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on the company’s quarterly earnings call. Murdoch offered few details on the streaming service beyond the high-level announcement. He said the company is designing the app now, and further information will be released in the coming months.

Fox’s upcoming streaming option is expected to include both its sports and news content, Murdoch said.

Unlike its legacy media competitors, Fox has so far been on the sidelines of streaming, with the exception of the Fox Nation streaming app, which includes exclusive programming to the service and on-demand Fox News primetime shows, and its free, ad-supported service Tubi. Fox, which will broadcast the Super Bowl on Sunday, is also offering the NFL’s biggest game on Tubi for the first time ever.

However, the late move into subscription-based streaming comes after Fox, alongside Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney, in January dropped efforts to launch a joint venture sports streaming app called Venu.

The three companies had planned to pool together all of their sports content and offer it on the Venu streaming service. However, following legal hurdles that delayed the original fall 2024 launch date, the companies called off their plans.

Out of the three partners, Fox was the only one without another option to offer its sports content outside of the cable TV bundle. Warner Bros. Discovery offers its live sports content on streamer Max. Disney’s ESPN has its ESPN+ app and is developing a separate direct-to-consumer ESPN streamer. The company is targeting an August launch of ESPN “Flagship,” the unofficial name of the all-inclusive ESPN service.

Fox’s Murdoch referred to the end of Venu as the company’s “only disappointment in sports.”

Fox has focused its strategy on sports and news content after selling its entertainment assets to Disney in 2019. The company has reported stable viewership and advertising revenue, even during the recent ad market slump. Live sports and news remain the highest-rated content in the traditional TV bundle, even as consumers cut the cord for streaming alternatives.

“We’re huge supporters of the traditional cable bundle, and we always will be,” Murdoch said on Tuesday’s call. “But having said that, we do want to reach consumers wherever they are, and there’s a large population, obviously, that are now outside of the traditional cable bundle.”

He said the company’s subscriber expectations “will be modest, and we’re going to price the service accordingly.” He added Fox doesn’t intend to convert any traditional cable TV customers into streaming customers with the app.

Murdoch said the company doesn’t “expect to have any exclusive rights costs or additional incremental rights costs” and will simply package its existing content. This means the costs of creating and distributing the platform will be “relatively low,” especially when compared with competitors.

In addition to shelling out billions for original entertainment programming, media companies have been spending big on exclusive sports media rights for their streaming platforms. In many cases, exclusive live sports have helped to drive subscriber and ad revenue growth for streamers.

On Tuesday, Murdoch also noted the recent rise of so-called skinny packages from traditional pay TV distributors, saying it bodes well for Fox’s portfolio since those packages most often consist of mainly sports and news content.

“We’re very pleased with this trend of the bundle. It’s financially, economically positive for us,” said Murdoch on Tuesday. “We would hope that this bundle will be attractive to the cordless customers — the cord-cutters and cord-nevers.”

Boeing has lost more than $2 billion and counting on its Starliner spacecraft after a rough year in which the capsule’s first astronaut flight turned into a headache for NASA.

The Starliner program reported charges of $523 million for 2024 — its largest single-year loss to date — Boeing reported in a filing on Monday. The company noted that Starliner is under a fixed-price contract from NASA, so “there is ongoing risk that similar losses may have to be recognized in future periods.”

Since 2014, when NASA awarded Boeing with a nearly $5 billion fixed-price contract to develop Starliner, the company has recorded losses on the program almost every year.

Boeing’s program competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has flown 10 crew missions for NASA and counting on its Dragon capsules.

Last summer, Boeing’s first crew flight went awry after part of the capsule’s propulsion system malfunctioned. While Starliner delivered astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station, NASA made the decision to bring Starliner back empty and use SpaceX to return the crew early this year — an agency choice that recently became politicized.

Neither Boeing nor NASA have provided details on how or when they plan to resolve the Starliner propulsion issue.

Boeing last week confirmed that Starliner Vice President Mark Nappi was leaving his role, Reuters reported, with the company’s ISS program manager John Mulholland named as his replacement. Mullholland previously led the Starliner program from 2011 to 2020.

Nearly four months ago, NASA said it was keeping “windows of opportunity for a potential Starliner flight in 2025,” but scheduled SpaceX to fly both its crews on missions launching in spring and late summer. NASA then specified that “the timing and configuration of Starliner’s next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing’s path to system certification is established.”

The agency has not given an update on Starliner since making those comments in October.

Disney posted fiscal first-quarter earnings Wednesday that beat on the top and bottom lines, but revealed the beginnings of expected streaming subscriber losses at Disney+.

The company’s streaming business reported another quarter of profitability despite a 1% decline in subscribers for Disney+, the company’s flagship service. While domestic subscriptions for the platform increased around 1%, international numbers declined around 2%. 

Disney warned during its fiscal fourth-quarter report in November that it expected a “modest decline” in subscriptions during the December period. Disney told investors Wednesday that it expects another “modest decline” in subscribers during the second quarter. 

Total paid Disney+ subscriptions stand at 124.6 million, compared to 125.3 million at the end of the company’s fiscal fourth quarter. Total Hulu subscriptions rose 3% during the period to 53.6 million.

The slowdown in streaming subscriber growth follows an increase in prices for its services last year. Disney+’s average monthly revenue per paid subscriber increased roughly 4% to $7.99 due to those price hikes, the company said.

Disney’s stock was up about 2% in premarket trading.

Here is what Disney reported for the period ended December 28 compared with what Wall Street expected, according to LSEG

Disney’s net income increased nearly 23% to $2.64 billion, or $1.40 per share, from $2.15 billion or $1.04 per share, during the same quarter last year. Adjusting for one-time items including restructuring charges and impairments related to intangible Hulu assets, Disney reported adjusted earnings of $1.76 per share. 

Revenue increased 4.8% to $24.69 billion compared to $23.55 billion in the year-earlier period.

The company saw revenue gains across the board for its entertainment, sports and experience segments. 

Its entertainment division saw a 9% jump in revenue, reaching $10.87 billion. Operating income for the unit, which includes its direct-to-consumer, linear and content sales businesses, increased 95% to $1.7 billion during the quarter thanks to higher content sales and licensing. Linear continued to drag on overall results. 

Still, CEO Bob Iger remained positive on Wednesday’s call with investors when it came to the linear TV business, echoing similar comments made in November’s earnings call.

“They are not a burden at all. They are actually an asset,” Iger said Wednesday, noting that Disney is programming and funding the networks so they can feed into streaming.

While he said he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of changes to the TV networks in the future, he said that wouldn’t be now.

“We actually feel good about the hand that we have and the manner in which we’re managing both the linear and streaming businesses across the board,” Iger said.

Disney’s box office success helped lift the company’s results during the quarter.

The debut of “Moana 2” over Thanksgiving weekend helped push the box office to new heights. The animated sequel was still going strong at the box office through the new year, topping $1 billion during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. The company noted Wednesday its content sales/licensing and other operating income got a boost from “Moana 2.”

Overall, Disney dominated the box office in 2024, with the help of other films like Marvel’s “Deadpool & Wolverine” and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2.”

The company said it expects double-digit growth in operating income for the entertainment segment in fiscal 2025, with an increase in direct-to-consumer operating income of around $875 million.

Over at its experiences business, which includes parks, cruises and resorts as well as consumer products, revenue rose 3% during the quarter to $9.42 billion. 

Domestic theme park revenue accounted for 68% of the division’s total, or $6.43 billion. While that revenue marked a 2% improvement over the same quarter last year, the combination of Hurricanes Milton and Helene coupled with declines in attendance and investments in Disney’s fleet of cruise ships weighed on domestic operating income. 

The experiences division posted a 5% decline in domestic theme park operating income for the quarter, at $1.98 billion. 

Disney expects its experience segment to see operating income growth of between 6% and 8% in fiscal 2025.

Theme parks in the U.S. have recently experienced a slowdown in foot traffic following the post-Covid surge in attendance.

Disney CFO Hugh Johnston said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the experiences segment performed better than expected for the fiscal quarter.

“In fact, the consumer is a bit stronger than we would have expected,” Johnston said Wednesday. “I think what we’re seeing is consumers are just very value focused, and you deliver value to them, they’re willing to pay the price for it.”

Disney’s parks recently turned a record revenue and profit, even as the company has raised prices for its destinations. The company is in the midst of a 10-year, $60 billion investment in the segment.

In sports, Disney’s ESPN reported revenue growth of 8% year over year, reaching $4.81 billion, and operating income that was up 15% from the prior-year period to $228 million. 

The company expects operating income for its overall sports segment, which houses ESPN as well as Star India, to grow 13% in fiscal 2025.

Disney said on Wednesday that its sports segment operating incoming for the fiscal second quarter would be “adversely impacted” by about $100 million related to the shifting of three College Football Playoff games from the first quarter into the second quarter as well as an additional NFL game during the period.

This fall Disney’s networks broadcasted the entirety of the Southeastern Conference college football schedule.

Disney’s broadcaster ABC averaged 5.8 million viewers for 46 regular season college football games, which was a 56% year-over-year increase, Disney executives noted in a commentary release on Wednesday. The recent college football season helped lift Disney’s advertising revenue this past season.

Meanwhile, Disney also said that guidance for unit operating income includes a roughly $50 million hit tied to its exit from the Venu sports joint venture. Disney and its joint venture partners, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox, called off their efforts to move forward with Venu, which was supposed to be a streaming app that included all of the live sports from its parent companies.

The change in strategy came after legal headaches that halted the launch of Venu last fall.

The rise of skinny bundles — traditional pay TV distributors’ slimmed-down offerings focused on sports and news networks — were a contributing factor, too. Iger said on Wednesday’s call with investors that Venu “basically looked redundant to us,” next to skinny bundle offerings.

As a result of the Venu stoppage, Fox on Tuesday announced it would move forward with its own streaming service after years of staying largely on the sidelines of the direct-to-consumer streaming game. Fox executives also noted that skinny bundles would benefit its portfolio of networks.

Disney has been looking into various ways to grow its streaming options, from merging its apps into Disney+ to exploring different options for ESPN, such as Venu.

The company also plans to launch its own direct-to-consumer streaming app for ESPN this fall, which has been the priority, company executives said Wednesday.

“We’re obviously leaning into the development of what is now called ‘Flagship,’ which is essentially ESPN with multiple, mulitple elements to it,” Iger said Wednesday, noting sports betting and consumers’ ability to customize the platforms to their preferences.

Disclosure: Comcast, which owns CNBC parent NBCUniversal, is a co-owner of Hulu.

The U.S. Postal Service has agreed to resume accepting shipments from China, less than 12 hours after announcing it would stop doing so.

‘Effective February 5, 2025, the Postal Service will continue accepting all international inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong Posts,’ it said in an updated statement Wednesday morning. ‘The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.’

The Postal Service had earlier announced it would stop accepting packages from China, as well as Hong Kong, in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to impose a new round of 10% tariffs on all goods coming from the country.

Letters and flats were not affected by the initial announcement. While the Postal Service did not offer an explanation for the shipment halt, Trump ended a so-called ‘de minimis’ exemption for Chinese goods worth less than $800 in making the tariff announcement.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson had earlier said China would take “necessary measures” to protect its companies, The Associated Press reported — urging the U.S. to “stop politicizing economic and trade issues and using them as a tool, and to stop unreasonably suppressing Chinese companies.”

CORRECTION (Feb. 5, 2025, 10:35 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated when the Postal Service announced it would resume accepting shipments from China. The move came 12 hours after it stopped doing so, not 24.

General Motors is laying off roughly half of the employees who remain at its discontinued Cruise robotaxi business.

The plans come two months after GM said it would no longer fund Cruise after spending more than $10 billion since acquiring the self-driving car business in 2016.

“Today, Cruise shared the difficult decision to part ways with approximately 50% of its workforce,” Cruise said in an emailed statement. “We are grateful for their passion and contributions to help us reach this stage, and our focus is on supporting them into their next chapter with severance packages and career support.”

Cruise had nearly 2,300 employees as of the end of last year, a GM spokesman previously told CNBC.

In an internal email sent Tuesday morning to all Cruise employees, which was viewed by CNBC, Cruise President and Chief Administrative Officer Craig Glidden wrote that the 50% reduction came “as a result of the change in strategy we announced in December.”

“With our move away from the ride-hail business and toward providing autonomous vehicles to customers alongside GM, our staffing and resource needs have dramatically changed,” Glidden wrote.

He added that a string of executives will also depart this week: Marc Whitten, CEO; Nilka Thomas, chief human resources officer; Steve Kenner, chief safety officer; and Rob Grant, chief government affairs officer. Mo Elshenawy, president and chief technology officer, will stay on at Cruise through the end of April to help with transition duties, Glidden wrote.

The Cruise layoffs, which were first reported by TechCrunch, were expected, but executives had previously declined to speculate on the amount.

The job cuts were announced in conjunction with the Detroit automaker reporting the completion of Cruise becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary within GM, which is now focusing on “personal autonomous vehicles” rather than robotaxis.

About 88% of remaining employees are in engineering or related roles, and impacted employees were given 60 days’ notice, according to the company.

During the remainder of their time with Cruise, the affected employees will receive full base pay, as well as eight weeks’ severance. Employees who had been with Cruise for more than three years will receive an additional two weeks’ pay for every additional year spent at Cruise, the company said.

“While not an easy decision, we are focused on combining efforts with General Motors to accelerate autonomy at scale on personal autonomous vehicles,” Cruise said.

GM’s Cruise was considered a leader in the business along with Alphabet-backed Waymo until the company grounded its robotaxi fleet and announced the end of its commercial operations late last year. That came after a October 2023 accident in which external probes found the company misled or deceived regulators about the incident.

In January 2024, a third-party probe into Cruise revealed that culture issues, ineptitude and poor leadership were at the center of regulatory oversights and coverup concerns that had plagued the company.

The report addressed, in part, controversy that had swirled around Cruise since an Oct. 2, 2023, accident in which a pedestrian in San Francisco was dragged 20 feet by a Cruise robotaxi after being struck by a separate vehicle. Results of the investigation, which reviewed whether Cruise representatives misled investigators or members of the media in discussing the incident, were published months later in a 105-page report.

Disney posted fiscal first-quarter earnings Wednesday that beat on the top and bottom lines, but revealed the beginnings of expected streaming subscriber losses at Disney+.

The company’s streaming business reported another quarter of profitability despite a 1% decline in subscribers for Disney+, the company’s flagship service. While domestic subscriptions for the platform increased around 1%, international numbers declined around 2%. 

Disney warned during its fiscal fourth-quarter report in November that it expected a “modest decline” in subscriptions during the December period. Disney told investors Wednesday that it expects another “modest decline” in subscribers during the second quarter. 

Total paid Disney+ subscriptions stand at 124.6 million, compared to 125.3 million at the end of the company’s fiscal fourth quarter. Total Hulu subscriptions rose 3% during the period to 53.6 million.

The slowdown in streaming subscriber growth follows an increase in prices for its services last year. Disney+’s average monthly revenue per paid subscriber increased roughly 4% to $7.99 due to those price hikes, the company said.

Disney’s stock was up about 2% in premarket trading.

Here is what Disney reported for the period ended December 28 compared with what Wall Street expected, according to LSEG

Disney’s net income increased nearly 23% to $2.64 billion, or $1.40 per share, from $2.15 billion or $1.04 per share, during the same quarter last year. Adjusting for one-time items including restructuring charges and impairments related to intangible Hulu assets, Disney reported adjusted earnings of $1.76 per share. 

Revenue increased 4.8% to $24.69 billion compared to $23.55 billion in the year-earlier period.

The company saw revenue gains across the board for its entertainment, sports and experience segments. 

Its entertainment division saw a 9% jump in revenue, reaching $10.87 billion. Operating income for the unit, which includes its direct-to-consumer, linear and content sales businesses, increased 95% to $1.7 billion during the quarter thanks to higher content sales and licensing. Linear continued to drag on overall results. 

Still, CEO Bob Iger remained positive on Wednesday’s call with investors when it came to the linear TV business, echoing similar comments made in November’s earnings call.

“They are not a burden at all. They are actually an asset,” Iger said Wednesday, noting that Disney is programming and funding the networks so they can feed into streaming.

While he said he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of changes to the TV networks in the future, he said that wouldn’t be now.

“We actually feel good about the hand that we have and the manner in which we’re managing both the linear and streaming businesses across the board,” Iger said.

Disney’s box office success helped lift the company’s results during the quarter.

The debut of “Moana 2” over Thanksgiving weekend helped push the box office to new heights. The animated sequel was still going strong at the box office through the new year, topping $1 billion during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. The company noted Wednesday its content sales/licensing and other operating income got a boost from “Moana 2.”

Overall, Disney dominated the box office in 2024, with the help of other films like Marvel’s “Deadpool & Wolverine” and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2.”

The company said it expects double-digit growth in operating income for the entertainment segment in fiscal 2025, with an increase in direct-to-consumer operating income of around $875 million.

Over at its experiences business, which includes parks, cruises and resorts as well as consumer products, revenue rose 3% during the quarter to $9.42 billion. 

Domestic theme park revenue accounted for 68% of the division’s total, or $6.43 billion. While that revenue marked a 2% improvement over the same quarter last year, the combination of Hurricanes Milton and Helene coupled with declines in attendance and investments in Disney’s fleet of cruise ships weighed on domestic operating income. 

The experiences division posted a 5% decline in domestic theme park operating income for the quarter, at $1.98 billion. 

Disney expects its experience segment to see operating income growth of between 6% and 8% in fiscal 2025.

Theme parks in the U.S. have recently experienced a slowdown in foot traffic following the post-Covid surge in attendance.

Disney CFO Hugh Johnston said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the experiences segment performed better than expected for the fiscal quarter.

“In fact, the consumer is a bit stronger than we would have expected,” Johnston said Wednesday. “I think what we’re seeing is consumers are just very value focused, and you deliver value to them, they’re willing to pay the price for it.”

Disney’s parks recently turned a record revenue and profit, even as the company has raised prices for its destinations. The company is in the midst of a 10-year, $60 billion investment in the segment.

In sports, Disney’s ESPN reported revenue growth of 8% year over year, reaching $4.81 billion, and operating income that was up 15% from the prior-year period to $228 million. 

The company expects operating income for its overall sports segment, which houses ESPN as well as Star India, to grow 13% in fiscal 2025.

Disney said on Wednesday that its sports segment operating incoming for the fiscal second quarter would be “adversely impacted” by about $100 million related to the shifting of three College Football Playoff games from the first quarter into the second quarter as well as an additional NFL game during the period.

This fall Disney’s networks broadcasted the entirety of the Southeastern Conference college football schedule.

Disney’s broadcaster ABC averaged 5.8 million viewers for 46 regular season college football games, which was a 56% year-over-year increase, Disney executives noted in a commentary release on Wednesday. The recent college football season helped lift Disney’s advertising revenue this past season.

Meanwhile, Disney also said that guidance for unit operating income includes a roughly $50 million hit tied to its exit from the Venu sports joint venture. Disney and its joint venture partners, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox, called off their efforts to move forward with Venu, which was supposed to be a streaming app that included all of the live sports from its parent companies.

The change in strategy came after legal headaches that halted the launch of Venu last fall.

The rise of skinny bundles — traditional pay TV distributors’ slimmed-down offerings focused on sports and news networks — were a contributing factor, too. Iger said on Wednesday’s call with investors that Venu “basically looked redundant to us,” next to skinny bundle offerings.

As a result of the Venu stoppage, Fox on Tuesday announced it would move forward with its own streaming service after years of staying largely on the sidelines of the direct-to-consumer streaming game. Fox executives also noted that skinny bundles would benefit its portfolio of networks.

Disney has been looking into various ways to grow its streaming options, from merging its apps into Disney+ to exploring different options for ESPN, such as Venu.

The company also plans to launch its own direct-to-consumer streaming app for ESPN this fall, which has been the priority, company executives said Wednesday.

“We’re obviously leaning into the development of what is now called ‘Flagship,’ which is essentially ESPN with multiple, mulitple elements to it,” Iger said Wednesday, noting sports betting and consumers’ ability to customize the platforms to their preferences.

Disclosure: Comcast, which owns CNBC parent NBCUniversal, is a co-owner of Hulu.

Mattel could soon raise the prices of toys such as Barbie and Hot Wheels in response to new tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, executives said Tuesday. 

The toy giant, which manufactures about 40% of its toys in China and less than 10% in Mexico, told analysts it will look to move around its supply chain to mitigate the effect of tariffs, but it is also considering price hikes.

“Certainly against the tariff, we have a range of mitigating actions,” said finance chief Anthony DiSilvestro on the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call. He said those actions include leveraging Mattel’s supply chains and “potential price increases.” 

“We do work closely with our retail partners to achieve the right balance and always keep consumers in mind when we consider pricing actions,” he added. 

The comments come after Trump imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese goods this week. He also paused planned 25% duties on imports from Mexico and Canada for 30 days.

Economists on both sides of the aisle have agreed that the levies will likely lead to price increases for consumers. There is no guarantee Trump will impose the tariffs on Mexico and Canada, as he has often used the threat of duties as a negotiating tactic to bend foreign governments to his will. 

Shortly after Trump announced the 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico, both countries announced they would bolster security at their respective borders, leading Trump to suspend the duties. The two nations had already been enhancing border security before Trump’s threat.

China and the U.S. have yet to come to a similar agreement to avoid the tariffs. If the 10% duty remains in effect, it will have a significant effect on the toy industry, which sources about 80% of its goods from the region. 

While companies such as Mattel have said publicly that they plan to leverage their supply chains and work with suppliers to mitigate the effects of the tariffs, executives have admitted privately that they are loath to take on the cost themselves and reduce profits. If they are not able to pass on the entire cost of the tariffs to suppliers, some plan to have consumers pay the rest through price hikes.

Some companies with diversified supply chains such as Mattel, which operates its own and third-party factories in seven different countries, have more flexibility to move production and lean on suppliers to lessen the hit to profits. It also does about 40% of its business outside of North America, where tariffs are not being imposed in the same way they are in the U.S. 

By 2027, Mattel expects sourcing from Mexico and China to represent more than 25% of total global production, down from about 50% now. It does not currently source from Canada.