Veenu has arrived. It looked. could not be conquered.
Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. announced Friday that they are canceling their upcoming sports streaming services, which were announced to great fanfare last year before facing legal challenges.
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 has passed and nothing else Little was said about it publicly. The two companies had been working together until news broke that the joint venture was ending.
“In an ever-changing market, we have determined that it is best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on our existing products and distribution channels,” the companies said in a statement.
Venu Sports was an interesting service that seemed like a bridge between the old cable bundles and the new world of a la carte streaming services. By combining sports content from three companies with non-sports programming, it's created for fans who love sports enough to pay $42.99 a month for a bundled streaming service, but don't want to pay more than $80 a month. Complete cable bundle. This includes channels like NBC, CBS, USA, and many others that also air sports.
We were never given any chance to see if we had a large enough audience to offer such a service.
Just two weeks after announcing the joint venture, both companies were sued by Fubo, a niche streaming service focused on live sports, alleging anti-competitive conduct. When Fubo wanted to distribute a company's sports channels, it had to pay to also distribute the companies' non-sports channels, such as Nat Geo Wild or Cartoon Network, whereas Venu only allowed distribution of its own sports channels. I was there.
A federal judge agreed that this was anticompetitive conduct. 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 an injunction against Fubo.
In her ruling, she wrote that Fubo likely would have succeeded in proving that Veenu “tends to substantially reduce competition or create a monopoly in violation of the antitrust laws of this country.” Ta.
But even late this week, Venu appeared to be on track for a late start.
Disney announced Monday that it will combine Hulu's live TV business with Fubo to create a company with 6.2 million live TV subscribers. That would make the company the sixth largest pay-TV distribution company in the country. Disney will own 70% of the new company.
Fubo and its joint venture partners filed a motion with the court to dismiss the lawsuit, which was granted Wednesday. But the next day, satellite TV providers DirecTV and EchoStar sent a letter to the judge, begging him to preserve the trial's findings.
“With this settlement, Defendants seek to repay and include the very competitors who brought these antitrust violations to court,” DirecTV said in the letter, adding that “this settlement seeks to provide coverage to the very competitors that brought these antitrust violations to court.” He also said that he was evaluating it. A thinly veiled suggestion that the company may also file a lawsuit.
The next day, Venu Sports died.
However, new streaming sports 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 channels without purchasing a cable bundle.
