Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Drop Venu Sports Streaming Service

Venu has come. It saw. It didn’t win.

Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. said Friday that its upcoming sports streaming service, which announced with great fanfare last year before facing legal challenges – will be discontinued.

The service was 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 passed and nothing more was said publicly. companies until the termination of the joint venture became known.

“In an ever-changing marketplace, we have determined that we can best meet the evolving needs of sports fans by focusing on our existing products and distribution channels,” the companies said in a statement.

Venu Sports was an interesting offering that seemed like a bridge between the old cable package and the new world of à la carte streaming services. Combining the three companies’ sports content with some non-sports shows, it was created for fans who love sports enough to pay $42.99 a month for a bundled streaming service but don’t want to pay $80 a month or more for a full cable package , which will include channels such as NBC, CBS and USA, which also show a variety of sports.

He never had the opportunity to test whether the audience was large enough for this kind of proposal.

Just two weeks after announcing the company’s joint venture Fubo sueda niche streaming service specializing in live sports, which said the companies were engaging in anti-competitive behavior. When Fubo wanted to distribute the companies’ sports channels, it had to pay and distribute the companies’ non-sports channels like Nat Geo Wild and Cartoon Network, but they only allowed Venu to distribute their sports channels.

A federal judge agreed that this was anticompetitive behavior. In August, a week before Venu was set to begin operations, Judge Margaret Garnett of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued an injunction against Fubo.

She wrote in her ruling that Fubo would likely succeed at trial by demonstrating that Venu would “substantially reduce competition or seek to create a monopoly in violation of this country’s antitrust laws.”

However, even this week it still looked like Venu was preparing for a delayed start.

Monday Disney said it merged its live TV business Hulu with Fubo, forming a company that will have 6.2 million live TV 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 asked 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, pleading with her to uphold the findings of the case.

“Under this agreement, defendants pay the price and seek to hold accountable the very competitor that brought these antitrust violations to court,” DirecTV wrote in its letter, which also said it was evaluating “its options regarding the joint venture ” a thinly veiled suggestion that it too might sue.

A day later, Venu Sports died.

But new sports streaming options are here to stay. Disney-owned ESPN will debut its flagship streaming service this year. For the first time, fans will be able to watch ESPN without having to buy a cable package.