Judge temporarily blocks Disney, Fox, Warner Bros. from launching their giant sports streaming thing
A judge has ruled Venu Sports can't launch this fall, basically on the grounds that it would chew up and spit out competitors
It’s rare, in the world of media, for any of the gigantic corporations who own the 99 percent of the TV and movies we consume to team up together on anything but the most temporary of bases. It usually means The Studios perceive something as a serious threat—as when they band together periodically to fight things out with the unions, like they did last year—or they sense that there’s an enormous amount of money to be made somewhere. (Case in point: The joint creation of Hulu several years back, when several of the big studios realized Netflix was getting rich off of streaming their content, and started trying to claw some cash back out of the online market.) So when Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced, back in February of this year, that they were teaming up for a new joint sports streaming endeavor called Venu Sports, everybody sat up and went “Oh, shit.”
Including, as it turns out, existing sports streaming service FuboTV, which has just successfully gotten a New York judge to block the service’s planned fall 2024 launch on the basis that it will basically blow all competition in the sports streaming market straight to hell. That gets fairly easy to understand as soon as you look at Venu’s model: It’s essentially the streaming version of a sports-focused cable package, allowing users to pay $42.99 to get full live streaming of ESPN, Fox, ABC, TNT, and TBS—i.e., the networks that, between them, carry sizable chunks of the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB, plus college sports and professional tennis. All this, without having to shell out for an actual cable package, which tend to have inflated prices—in part, because those same studios cut deals with the cable companies forcing them to bundle in less-popular channels with the ones the sports fanatics actually want access to. (Which means, yes, Venu is basically an offer from Disney, Fox, and WBD to free you from an expensive burden they were intentionally imposing on you; welcome to America.)
Fubo—which started in 2015 as a soccer streaming option, and which charges a baseline of $70 a month to give users in its U.S. markets access to a wide variety of live sports streaming options—started getting litigious pretty much from the jump, filing an antitrust suit against Venu just two weeks after it was announced. An unflattering description of their claims could best be summed up as “This thing will kick the shit out of us,” but there is some nuance there: Notably, since Fubo licenses most of its live sports content in the U.S. from these studios, they have free reign to set prices, meaning Fubo has no capacity to compete on price. Also, there’s the above-mentioned bit where Disney/Fox/Warner are using their discretion to not hit themselves with all that bundling bullshit in order to make their own option more appealing.
Anyway: New York judge Margaret Garnett has now officially ruled that Fubo might have a point, re: the “getting the shit kicked out of them” of it all. The judge has ruled that Venu can’t go forward with its plans to launch, and all but said that it’ll put Fubo directly out of business if it ever does, shrinking the sports streaming market down to an uncompetitive state. (Which is nice, in terms of getting your legal way, we guess, but still has to be pretty depressing to hear get confirmed by a judge.) Representatives for ESPN have issued their public disagreement with the judge’s call, writing that, “We believe that Fubo’s arguments are wrong on the facts and the law, and that Fubo has failed to prove it is legally entitled to a preliminary injunction. Venu Sports is a pro-competitive option that aims to enhance consumer choice by reaching a segment of viewers who currently are not served by existing subscription options.”