Fubo TV States Venu Sports Would Have An “Artificial Advantage”
Earlier this year, Disney announced it would team up with Warner Brothers Discovery and FOX to launch a brand new sports streaming service called Venu Sports. This service would bring together all three companies’ sports networks and ESPN+, including content from all the major professional sports leagues and college sports.
The new streaming service, which would be priced at $42.99 per month, was originally scheduled to launch in the fall of 2024. It would also be possible to bundle the platform with Disney+, Hulu, or Max.
The initial reaction from many sports fans was positive since this new platform could save money for those fans on a traditional linear package.
Disney stated that the formation and launch of Venu Sports were subject to regulatory approval and the finalization of definitive agreements among the parties. And it didn’t take long for the launch of this new streaming service to hit some bumps along the way as Fubo TV took the joint venture to court to get a temporary injunction to stop the launch, resulting in the launch of Venu Sports being pushed back over a year. Many other major television providers also joined in with the case since the launch of this new streaming service threatened their existence.
Lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Joaquin Castro and Rep. Jerry Nadler have also voiced their concerns over the existence of Venu Sports to the Department of Justice.
Earlier this week, Fubo filed a 70-page report with the courts to keep the Venu Sports injunction in place, as they claimed that the joint venture from Disney, Warner Brothers Discovery, and FOX have structured Venu Sports in a way that will destroy any potential competition.
Fubo claims that Venu Sports has “a built-in advantage: the exclusive right to distribute their combined, commercially critical sports content without also having to pay for – and force viewers to pay for – unwanted non-sports channels.”
“They further propose to give their JV the exclusive right to offer consumers the ability to subscribe to sports and only to sports programming – a coveted arrangement known as a ‘skinny sports bundle. No distributor can compete in the market for live pay television without the commercially critical sports content that defendants control and the JV would offer.
As a condition of licensing that content, defendants now force distributors to carry other, unwanted content. Under defendants’ anticompetitive agreement, the [joint venture] would become the only distributor able to carry their sports content without also carrying (and paying for) their other content. That exclusive access would give the JV a built-in advantage over every other distributor – a manufactured pathway to instant market dominance.
Its artificial advantage will capture hundreds of thousands of subscribers and tens of millions of dollars from Fubo alone, driving Fubo into insolvency, and destroying or damaging other distributors. The foreseeable outcome for viewers will be higher prices and fewer choices,”
Roger’s Take: It’s unlikely that the temporary injunction is going to be lifted and with a huge shift in the political landscape, it’s unclear what will happen next. The court case isn’t scheduled to begin until October 2025, so Venu Sports will lose another year, at which point Disney will have launched its new direct-to-consumer version of ESPN, and more people will have left linear television by then. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire project is abandoned if they fail to get the injunction removed.
Do you think Venu Sports will launch as planned? Let me know on social media!
Roger Palmer
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