Venu came. It saw. It did not conquer.
Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. said Friday that their upcoming sports streaming service — which was announced to great fanfare last year before being beset by legal challenges — would be shut down.
The service had been given a name (Venu Sports), a management team (led by former Apple CEO Pete Distad) and a target launch date (August 23, 2024), but that date passed and little else had been said publicly by the companies until the news that the joint venture would end.
“In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined it was best to meet the changing demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels,” the companies said in a statement.
Venu Sports was a curious offering that seemed to bridge the gap between the old cable bundle and the new world of a la carte streaming services. Combining the three companies' sports content, along with some non-sports shows, it was made for the fan who loved sports enough to pay $42.99 a month for a bundled streaming service, but not $80 a month or more wanted to pay for the full cable bundle, which also includes channels such as NBC, CBS and USA that also show a lot of sports.
The opportunity was never given to see if there was enough of an audience for that kind of offering.
Just two weeks after the joint venture was announced, the companies were sued by Fubo, a niche streaming service focused on the distribution of live sports, which alleged that the companies engaged in anticompetitive conduct. When Fubo wanted to distribute the companies' sports channels, it had to pay for and also distribute the companies' non-sports channels such as Nat Geo Wild and Cartoon Network, but they allowed Venu to only distribute their sports channels.
A federal judge agreed that this was anticompetitive conduct. In August, a week before Venu was set to go live, Judge Margaret Garnett of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted Fubo an injunction.
In her ruling, she wrote that Fubo would likely have succeeded in a lawsuit showing that Venu “will materially diminish competition or tend to create a monopoly in violation of the antitrust laws of this country.”
This week, however, it still looked like Venu was headed for a delayed start.
On Monday, Disney said it will combine its Hulu live television business with Fubo, creating a company that will have 6.2 million live television subscribers. That would make it the sixth-largest pay-TV distributor in the country. Disney will own 70 percent of the new company.
Fubo and the joint venture partners petitioned the court to dismiss the lawsuit, which was granted on Wednesday. But a day later, satellite TV providers DirecTV and EchoStar wrote letters to the judge, imploring her to uphold her findings in the case.
“Through this settlement, Defendants are paying and seeking to subjugate the very competitor that brought these antitrust violations to court,” DirecTV wrote in its letter, in which it also said it was “examining its options regarding the joint venture.” evaluation was. a thinly veiled suggestion that she too might file a lawsuit.
A day later, Venu Sports was dead.
But new streaming sports options will continue. Disney-owned ESPN will debut its flagship streaming service this year, marking the first time fans can get ESPN channels without having to buy the cable bundle.
