Murdoch’s effort is a long shot to topple ESPN, or at least take a huge bite out of it.

ESPN brings in more than $6 billion annually from its industry-high subscriber fees. It owns the rights to televise Major League Baseball; the N.F.L.; the N.B.A.; Nascar; tennis; myriad collegiate conferences; the Bowl Championship Series and its new playoffs; and a raft of other sports. Both ESPN and ESPN2 have 98.5 million subscribers.

It is a true empire, with eight domestic cable channels; the ESPN3 broadband network; the Web sites ESPN.com and Grantland.com; a radio network; digital properties like ESPNw, which focuses on women’s sports; a magazine; the WatchESPN app, which enables viewing of ESPN on computers, smartphones and tablets; and ownership of the Global X Games, college basketball tournaments and seven bowl games.

Fox Sports 1 will join a market that is far more crowded than it was when Murdoch first contemplated squaring off against ESPN. Not only will Fox face the dominance of ESPN, but NBC and CBS have their own sports channels, which are struggling for viewers and identities. The Big Ten and Pacific-12 conferences have created their own networks, and the Southeastern Conference is planning one. And in the past decade, M.L.B., the N.F.L., the N.B.A. and the N.H.L. have started their own channels.

Still, Fox and its parent, News Corporation, have a companywide faith in sports as a DVR-proof way to attract viewers — especially young men — and a belief that their new sports channel will differentiate itself from the competition, as the Fox News channel has demonstrated in its successful challenge to CNN and then MSNBC. To ensure that Fox Sports 1 has some of the style and attitude that Fox Sports has had since it began in the mid-1990s, Murdoch and Chase Carey, News Corporation’s president and chief operating officer, brought back one of their favorite executives, David Hill, for its creation and launch. Hill, the former head of the Fox Sports Media Group, left the division last year for another job within News Corporation.

“We think sports is a huge arena that has room in it to build a really attractive businesses,” Carey told analysts on an earnings call last month. He said that the company recognizes the escalating costs of sports rights but “in a world of increasing fragmentation, we think sports continues to be a more and more important and unique part of that overall landscape.”