Foxtel Group will retire the Fox Sports name in 2027 and fold Fox Footy, Fox League and Fox Cricket into Kayo Sports, the company told advertisers at its annual upfront at Barangaroo in Sydney on Thursday night. It is the first major rebranding since the British streaming company DAZN bought the business last year, and it ends a name that has been on Australian pay television since 1996.
Under the change, Fox Footy becomes Kayo Footy, Fox League becomes Kayo League and Fox Cricket becomes Kayo Cricket, with the remaining channels carrying the Kayo Sports name. The company says its on-air talent, journalists and production teams stay, and that every AFL and NRL home-and-away match will again be live in 2027. It gave no date for the switch, said nothing about the Fox Sports News channel, and did not say why the Fox name is going.
The advertising sales arm is being renamed too. Foxtel Media, set up in 2019, becomes DAZN Media+, selling ads across Kayo, Binge, Foxtel and Foxtel Go. DAZN paid A$3.4 billion for Foxtel, buying out News Corp and Telstra in a deal completed in April 2025, and the company now puts its own spending on sports rights and production at $1 billion a year. "With the global scale, capability and expertise of DAZN behind us, 2027 marks an exciting new chapter for Foxtel Group," chief executive Patrick Delany said.
Fox Sports managing director Steve Crawley told B&T the new owner's backing meant "Kayo SPORTS is only going to grow and grow and grow into a sports media powerhouse". The company used the night to announce extensions with MotoGP, which moves to an Adelaide street circuit from November 2027, the PGA Tour and the 2027 America's Cup, in which an Australian syndicate led by Tom Slingsby will challenge for the first time in almost three decades. The same owner now holds the AFL, the NRL, the cricket summer, Formula 1, Supercars and the American leagues through ESPN, and in February Delany argued the anti-siphoning rules that keep listed events on free-to-air television "make no sense".
What advertisers were sold was data. DAZN Media+ said its Sports Audience Graph, built from first-party viewing records on six million sports fans since Kayo launched in 2018 and matched with club membership, demographic and transaction data, will be available to brands from 2027. It also announced an automated sales agent for buyers, a stadium screens deal with SureVision covering the Gabba and 4 Pines Park, and independent audience measurement through AudienceProject. "The Australian sports ecosystem is data-rich but insight-poor," chief sales officer Nev Hasan said.
On the entertainment side, Binge's executive director of content Daniel Monaghan put the group's Australian spend on news, drama and entertainment at $130 million, without breaking it down, and said the streamer would make "four to six originals a year". The biggest local announcement was The Real Housewives of Melbourne, back for a sixth season filming in 2027 with Gina Liano, the barrister who anchored the first four seasons and sat out the fifth in 2021. "It's been a while between drinks, but some things are worth waiting for," Liano said. ITV Studios Australia produces.
Rachel Griffiths joins Wentworth: Halfway Home as Moira, a beauty therapist turned society wife paroled after three years of a five-year fraud sentence, with Sophie Lowe as Sam, a former stalker. The series, shooting in Melbourne since late July with Fremantle Australia, has Screen Australia as principal investor with VicScreen and premieres on Binge late this year. "Moira is a delicious character to bring to life," Griffiths said. Binge also showed first footage of Tough Love, an eight-part comedy created by Rick Donald and starring Miranda Otto as a mother with a cancer diagnosis, funded by Foxtel with Screen Australia and Screen NSW and due in 2027. Both are public screen-agency money landing on shows a foreign-owned platform will hold exclusively.
The night closed with a long-term extension of the NBCUniversal deal from 2028, bringing the Hayu reality service onto Foxtel boxes. The concrete dates are Halfway Home later this year and Housewives cameras rolling in 2027. The date the Fox Sports logo comes down is not one the company has yet given.
