NFL On Fox
For some time Rupert Murdoch, chief executive officer of News Corporation, the parent company of the Fox network, lusted after a major-league sports presence for his network. He thought that landing a live sports broadcasting package would elevate Fox to the level of ABC, CBS and NBC, the other nationwide broadcast networks in the United States at the time.
In 1987, the network bid for Monday Night Football, then the NFL's crown-jewel program, but the offer was rejected. Six years later, in December 1993, Fox stunned the sports and TV worlds by acquiring partial rights to the NFL. The package – covering four seasons of games involving teams in the National Football Conference, as well as Super Bowl XXXI, a package previously owned by CBS – cost Fox $1.58 billion. CBS, then run by the cost-cutting Laurence Tisch, had reportedly bid only $290 million and was unwilling to even approach the Fox offer.
At the time of Fox's bid, most of its affiliates were lower-powered UHF stations. As Fox put together its new sports division to cover the NFL, it wanted to affiliate with VHF stations that had lower channel numbers (channels 2 to 13), more established histories, and carried more value with advertisers.
Read more about this topic: U.S. Television Network Affiliate Switches Of 1994