Fox Sports 1

Fox Sports 1 (branded on-air as FS1) is an American pay television channel owned by the Fox Sports Media Group, a unit of Fox Corporation. FS1 airs an array of live sporting events, including Major League Baseball and the World Baseball Classic, college sports (most notably Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big 12 football, and Big East basketball), soccer matches (including Major League Soccer, Liga MX, CONCACAF Champions Cup, and FIFA World Cup), and a variety of motorsports events. FS1 also features daily sports news, analysis and discussion programming as well as sports-related reality and documentary programs.

FS1 replaced the motorsports-centric network Speed on August 17, 2013, while its companion channel Fox Sports 2 replaced Fuel TV. Both FS1 and FS2 carried over most of the sports programming from their predecessors, as well as content from Fox Soccer, which would then be replaced by the entertainment-based channel FXX on September 2, 2013.

The network is based primarily from the Fox Sports division's headquarters on the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City section of Los Angeles, though the network also has significant broadcast operations in New York City and Charlotte, North Carolina (the latter of which had served as Speed's home base).

As of September 2018^[update], Fox Sports 1 was available to approximately 83.3 million pay television households (90.3% of households with cable) in the United States. As of June 2023^[update], the channel's reach had been reduced to 72.4 million homes.

In March 2012, reports began circulating that Fox Entertainment Group had plans to launch a national Fox Sports cable network by August 2013 known as Fox Sports 1, giving the sports division a dedicated cable presence to better compete against established networks like ESPN. Fox was already a major force in cable sports programming, having operated several niche channels such as Fox Soccer, Fox Deportes, Fuel TV and Fox College Sports. Also in its portfolio were the Fox Sports Networks, a group of regional sports networks both owned by Fox outright or by other companies through affiliation agreements with FSN; in addition to carrying play-by-play rights to several local sports teams, these regional networks also featured common national content produced and distributed by Fox Sports, including national college sports broadcasts and specialty programs such as The Best Damn Sports Show Period and Baseball's Golden Age.

Though this local/national hybrid approach gave Fox prominence at the local sports level, it was somewhat disadvantaged as its flagship over-the-air network had the distinction of being the only major U.S. broadcast television network not to have a national general sports channel to complement its sports division, unlike ABC (whose corporate parent The Walt Disney Company owns an 80% stake in and operating control of ESPN), CBS (which operates CBS Sports Network) and NBC (which operated NBCSN).

The reports indicated that Fox planned on converting one of these niche sports channels, Speed – which focused on auto racing and other motorsports – into the new Fox Sports 1 due to its established reach on U.S. pay television providers (Speed maintained a subscriber base of 81 million homes with cable, IPTV or satellite service by 2012), which would result in the reduction of the channel's commitment to NASCAR and other motorsports coverage.

Further supporting this theory, reports surfaced in January 2013 that Fox Soccer would be relaunched as FXX, a general entertainment network that would be spun off from FX and would feature comedy series and feature films; such reports were confirmed when the channel's planned launch was officially announced by Fox Entertainment Group on March 28, 2013. In October 2012, Speed altered its on-air logo bug to include the Fox Sports logo above its own, which was believed to indicate a step towards this replacement. Fox Sports would officially confirm the conversion of Speed into Fox Sports 1 in an announcement on March 5, 2013.