Venu came. Saw. He didn't win.
Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. said Friday that their upcoming sports streaming service, which was announced with great fanfare last year before being hit by legal challenges, would be discontinued.
The service had been given a name (Venu Sports), a management team (led by former Apple executive Pete Distad) and an expected launch date (August 23, 2024), but that date passed and little else had been said. publicly stated by the companies until the news that the joint venture was ending.
“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 be a bridge between the old cable package and the new world of on-demand streaming services. Combining sports content from all three companies, along with some non-sports programming, it was created for the fan who liked sports enough to pay $42.99 a month for an included streaming service, but didn't want to pay $80. per month or more for the full cable package, which would include channels like NBC, CBS and USA that also show many sports.
He was never given the opportunity to see if there was a big enough audience for that kind of offering.
Just two weeks after the joint venture was announced, the companies were sued by Fuboa niche streaming service that focuses on distributing live sports, which claimed the companies were engaging in anti-competitive behavior. When Fubo wanted to distribute the companies' sports channels, it had to pay and also distribute the companies' non-sports channels, such as Nat Geo Wild and Cartoon Network, but they allowed Venu to distribute only their sports channels.
A federal judge agreed that this was anti-competitive behavior. In August, a week before Venu was scheduled to go live, Judge Margaret Garnett of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granted Fubo an injunction.
In his ruling, he wrote that Fubo likely would have succeeded in a lawsuit showing that Venu “will substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in violation of the antitrust laws of this country.”
However, this week it still looked like Venu was on track for a delayed start.
On Monday, Disney saying which 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 pay television 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, and that was granted Wednesday. But a day later, satellite television providers DirecTV and EchoStar wrote letters to the judge, imploring her to preserve her findings in the case.
“Through this agreement, defendants pay and seek to subsume the same 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 he might also sue.
A day later, Venu Sports was dead.
But new sports streaming options will continue. Later this year, Disney-owned ESPN will debut its flagship streaming service, the first time fans will be able to get ESPN channels without having to purchase the cable package.
