Came came. He saw. He did not conquer.
Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. announced Friday that their upcoming sports streaming service – which was announced with great fanfare last year, before being rocked by legal challenges, would be halted.
The service had been given a name (Venu Sports), a management team (led by former Apple executive Pete Distad), and a target launch date (August 23, 2024), but that date has passed and little else things were said publicly by the companies until the end of the joint venture was announced.
“In an ever-changing market, 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 be a bridge between the old cable package and the new world of pay-per-view streaming services. By combining sports content from all three companies, as well as some non-sports programming, it was designed for fans who love sports enough to pay $42.99 a month for a bundled streaming service, but don’t want to pay $80 per month or more for a streaming service. the complete cable package, which would include channels like NBC, CBS and USA which also broadcast many sports.
He was never given the opportunity to see if there was a large enough audience for this kind of offer.
Just two weeks after the joint venture was announced, the companies were continued by Fuboa niche streaming service focused on live sports distribution, which claimed the companies engaged in anticompetitive behavior. When Fubo wanted to distribute the companies’ sports channels, it had to pay for and also distribute the companies’ non-sports channels like Nat Geo Wild and Cartoon Network, but they allowed Venu to distribute only their sports channels.
A federal judge found this to be anticompetitive behavior. In August, a week before Venu was scheduled 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 likely would have succeeded in a lawsuit showing that Venu “would materially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in violation of this country’s antitrust laws.”
However, as recently as this week, it still looked like Venu was on track for a delayed start.
Monday, Disney said it was combining its Hulu live TV business with Fubo, forming a company that will have 6.2 million live TV subscribers. This 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 asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, which was granted Wednesday. But a day later, satellite television stations DirecTV and EchoStar wrote letters to the judge, imploring him to preserve his findings in the case.
“Through this settlement, Defendants pay and seek to encompass the very competitor that brought these antitrust violations to court,” DirecTV wrote in its letter, in which it also said it was evaluating “its options regarding the joint venture”. a thinly veiled suggestion that she might also take legal action.
A day later, Venu Sports was dead.
But new sports streaming options will continue. Disney-owned ESPN will launch its flagship streaming service this year, marking the first time fans will be able to get ESPN channels without having to purchase the cable package.