Details on Tucker Carlson's New Show

On Wednesday night, Tucker Carlson announced the details of his new digital show, Tucker Carlson Today. It will only be available on Fox Nation, Fox News' OTT, and will air each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The first episode debuts this Monday.

Last month, I wrote about Tucker Carlson's new show and how cable news will try to grow in the OTT and podcasting spaces over the next four years:

The cable news networks need to avoid the same mistake ESPN made in letting Barstool pull away with online sports shows and counter the rise of the independent hosts — Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Steven Crowder, and Pod Save America — by offering their own big-name personalities in that space. All three networks have the names to do it, so new hires are not necessary. The networks just need to utilize the personalities they already have more effectively.

I also discussed the topic of FNC putting Carlson's show, promoted as a podcast, behind a paywall as opposed to free across various podcast players:

Small, independent outlets can run a successful business with one or two podcast hosts, as long as their shows are in the top 1% of podcast downloads. So while Fox could make money from a free-to-consumer podcast built around Carlson, the list of others is limited. Should Carlson move subscriptions for Fox Nation, the upside would far outweigh the revenue he’d bring in with a free podcast.

For more context on that, the graphic below from Axios offers a look at podcast downloads. You may also read about it here.

Though adding Carlson to Fox Nation is a challenging process, it will help Fox Nation become a leading OTT in the industry. It will also send a message to other FNC hosts who perhaps haven’t viewed the service as a place to grow their careers. ESPN made a similar move when they added top star Stephen A. Smith to ESPN+, indicating to ESPN talents that ESPN+ is the future.