Lachlan K. Murdoch
Executive Chair and Chief Executive Officer at FOX
Thank you, Gabby, and thank you all for joining us this morning to discuss our fiscal first quarter earnings. Today, we again reported strong operating and financial results. We've had a great quarter and a great start to our fiscal year. Our EBITDA of over $1 billion was up 21% on the back of, of sustained revenue growth, which this quarter reached 11%, demonstrating the power of our content and brands and the ability of our strategy to consistently deliver outstanding results.
In the month of October alone, Fox Networks reached over 145 million people. During this election cycle, Americans have turned to FOX News more than any other service to cover the key issues and events leading up to tomorrow's election. Among those events were FOX News hosted programming that in and of themselves made news and clearly resonated with viewers.
For example, Gutfeld! delivered its highest-rated telecast in history with almost 5 million viewers tuning in on September 18th's episode with President Trump joining the studio. This was followed by the Trump town hall hosted by Harris Faulkner, which also garnered exceptionally strong ratings. But as notable as these were, it was Brett Bayer's interview with Vice President Harris, that set a new bar for political interviews, generating over 9 million viewers on October 16. And while the election is top-of-mind today, our news teams have done a brilliant job continuously reporting on events across the world for our audience. Our dedication to news, fair and balanced delivered almost 4 billion hours of FOX News Media content consumed across linear and digital platforms during Q1.
During the quarter, news total audience grew more than 40% year-over-year and more than 60% in the key 25-year to 54-year-old demo. With engagement like this, it's no surprise that the FOX News Channel was the second most-watched network in all of weekday television this past quarter, trailing only the Summer Olympics enhanced NBC. Once again, FOX News ended the quarter as the most-watched cable network in total day and in prime time, while maintaining its lead over peers as the most-watched cable news network.
Additionally, during the quarter, FOX News was the number one cable news channel. Number one, among all major political parties in the demo. That's right the number one news channel with Republicans, the number one news channel with Democrats and the number one news channel with Independence. We are number one in all the key swing states, and we are number one with Asian and Hispanic viewers. Our audience is as diverse as it is valuable, it is as engaged as it is remarkably loyal, loyal through news and election cycles.
Ratings momentum at FOX News continued through October with second quarter to date total debuting to total day ratings up 20% and prime ratings up over 30% over prior year. Obviously, this election is not limited to the presidential race. We have also seen highly contested down ballot and issue propositions across our strategic local station footprint.
From a revenue perspective, it's the local stations that are our election heroes, but it's not just our stations that are benefiting from strong political spend. This cycle, we have seen Tubi, become a material recipient of political advertising. Tubi's large but hard to reach audience, coupled with its, with its advanced targeting and geo-targeting capabilities have clearly differentiated Tubi as campaigns look to maximize reach and efficiency.
Now I'm happy to report that company-wide, we have achieved record political revenue for both the first quarter and the full fiscal year, inclusive of the very substantial and dramatic impact of the 2020 Georgia Senate runoff. Strong engagement coupled with healthy direct response growth resulted in 19% revenue growth of Tubi during the quarter, which has accelerated in Q2 thus far. Based on the current revenue run rate, we're looking for Tubi to cross the $1 billion [Phonetic] revenue mark this fiscal year.
Turning to FOX Sports, we're having a strong fall season across our renowned portfolio of rights. For example, just last week, our Sports roster featured Green Bay, Detroit and America's Game of the Week, Ohio State and Penn State in our Big Noon college football window and the Yankees-Dodgers World Series. The MLB postseason has been both impressive and dramatic. Fox had the highest rated Divisional Series ever on FOX Sports 1, the most-watched League championship series in the past five years and the best Major League Baseball postseason on Fox, since 2017. And of course, the World Series dream match-up of the Yankees versus the Dodgers featuring two iconic franchises and some of Major League Baseball's biggest stars. We saw an average of 16 million viewers tune in each night of the five-game series across our networks with almost 19 million viewers watching Game 5, making this the most-watched World Series and Game 5 in seven years.
Moving on to football, the NFL on Fox is off to its best start in five years with America's Game of the Week, the number one program on all television, averaging almost 26 million viewers, including a strong 28% increase in viewership in younger demos versus last season. Additionally, we successfully launched our new Fox College Football Fridays in September, which is averaging nearly 3 million viewers each week, handily outrating our prior our prior Friday night programming by over 40% in its first month. And we still have a pretty robust football calendar yet to come, culminating with our broadcast of Super Bowl 59, where, I'm sorry to say we are already sold out and at record pricing.
The excitement continues at FOX Entertainment. The fall premiere of Universal Basic Guys was TV's most-watched animation debut of the past decade and the season's number one comedy among adults 18 to 49, while Rescue: HI-Surf was TV's highest rated fall drama debut in four years. Fox's first quarter results once again highlight the strength of our leadership brands and demonstrate the merits of our differentiated strategy. Our momentum is supported by outstanding content across our platforms and an advertising market that is healthy for us across the board. This operating effectiveness, coupled with the strength of our balance sheet support our commitment to delivering long-term shareholder value, whether that be through growing our existing business, thoughtful M&A or returning capital to our shareholders.
And with that, let me now turn it over to Steve for some further details.