Disney may be in monopoly trouble over whole Fubo-ESPN issue

A decade from now, law students are going to wade through the muck of legal drama around Disney, Hulu, Fubo, and Venu, and wonder why the hell we couldn’t give anything a normal name. Unfortunately for them, that homework assignment just got a little longer.

Yesterday, a Fubo subscriber filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Disney accusing the megacorp of antitrust violations. According to the suit, via Deadline, “Disney’s ownership of ESPN… enables it to extract monopoly rents” in the live television streaming market, through monopoly tactics such as “forcing streaming services to carry Disney’s non-ESPN content in order to access ESPN [and] forcing streaming services to include ESPN, the nation’s most expensive content channel, as part of their base—or cheapest—package for consumers.” 

In essence, the plaintiff wants to be able to watch the Sunday game without also having to pay for the entirety of the new Fubo-Hulu + Live TV joint venture. If you need a little refresher on the players here, Disney, which owns both Hulu and ESPN, merged Hulu’s live TV option with competitor Fubo in a surprise decision last week. The Mouse House now owns 70% of the venture, but it will continue to operate under the Fubo name. Fubo had previously been embroiled in a legal battle with Disney over Venu, the latter’s proposed sports “skinny bundle” with Warner Bros. and Fox. The plaintiff could have gotten closer to what he wanted with that option, but Disney and Warner Bros. also announced last week that they were scrapping the planned service before it began. While Disney may have settled their dispute with Fubo, the trades reported that Venu also risked new litigation from satellite broadcasters Dish and DirecTV, the latter of which announced its own skinny sports bundle earlier today.  

All of which is to say—remember cable? Simpler times. Hopefully the plaintiff gets his due as compensation for being forced to parse through all this nonsense, much less the actual reason he decided to sue.