Venu Sports is Dead on Arrival

Why the joint WBD-Fox-Disney streamer is already on ice

As it stands today, Venu Sports is really more of a thought experiment than an app on your Roku. It’s an idea, man.

The name recognition is accordingly low, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, fret not! I’ll explain.

Venu Sports is what Fox, Disney, and wouldn’t you know it, Warner Bros. Discovery — the oh-so-recently-scorned media conglomerate that just lost the NBA — were going to call their joint sports streaming platform. It was going to cost $42.99/month and launch before the start of the NFL season, i.e. now-ish, thus capitalizing on Fox and ESPN’s many football offerings. As I’m sure any of those companies’ executives would tell you, it was going to be great.

But the goings aren’t great for Venu. They’re definitely not launching on time, and there’s a real possibility that they never launch at all, thanks to my favorite kind of pesky law. Auntie Trust is back in town, and boy am I glad to see her. It’s been too long.

This routes back to the existing sports streamer Fubo, a brand that more of you will probably recognize. Their whole thing is along the lines of what Venu promised to be: a sports-first cord-cutting platform that fans could subscribe to and get all the sports they wanted without paying for a far more expensive cable package.

Given it stood to cut in on their customer base, Fubo didn’t like it when the three above-named companies announced Venu earlier this year. In fact, they didn’t like it so very much that they sued them.

Now, a district judge has issued what’s called a preliminary injunction in that case, which is an order that a judge makes early on in a lawsuit for one of two reasons: to “stop the defendant from continuing their allegedly harmful actions, or commanding them to act in a certain manner to preserve the status quo before the final judgment.” Thanks, Cornell Legal Information Institute!

In this instance, it’s kinda both. The allegedly harmful action, per Fubo, would be Venu existing, and the status quo is that Venu does not. It’s but a twinkle in those boardrooms’ eyes. Thus it could very well be until the “final judgment” — the drama! — that Venu even has the potential to launch. And by the sounds of it, that date could be February 2025 or later.

I’m not a lawyer, so don’t hold me to this, but it strikes me as unusual that a major joint venture like this was fully prevented from launching at the behest of a judge, though it’s a bit of a misdirect to chalk it up to the one with the gavel and chambers and such.

This is really happening because Fubo alleged that Venu was doing something illegal. Their claim: that Fox, Disney, and WBD forces Fubo, a sports platform, to pay additional fees for non-sports-related Fox, Disney, and WBD channels/content that Fubo isn’t interested in airing.

Thus, when Fubo heard that those three companies were going to launch their own service, Venu, at roughly half the price of Fubo (which charges $80/mo.), they filed an antitrust suit and accused the trio of undercutting their service with an anticompetitive advantage that only they had access to.

In the TV industry, what Fubo’s complaining about are called carriage fees, which… suck. They’re why your cable bill is so high, if you still have one. Pay-TV providers (meaning cable, satellite, or streaming companies) pay TV networks (like Fox, Disney, and WBD) to “carry” their channels.

The TV networks don’t like letting those pay-TV providers pick and choose, because it doesn’t let them maximize their earnings. I’ll use WBD as an example. They don’t want to let Xfinity, and therefore Xfinity’s subscribers, pay for TNT without also paying for TBS (very funny). They like package deals, because package deals are more expensive.

That’s what Fubo says the triumvirate’s been doing to them as well, and while that’s probably been objectionable from Fubo’s perspective for many years now, the fact that Fox/ESPN/WBD then aimed to start their own service where those fees aren’t passed down to consumers puts that in clearer view.

That leaves the big question of whether Venu will ever materialize at all. You know that saying, ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’? I’d invert that here. Where there is no will… well. There’s no way.

I’m not sure this trio of strange bedfellows is going to like the concessions they’re instructed to make in order to make Venu happen. I could be wrong — I frequently am — but this whole arrangement always felt a little thrown together to me, and I’d seriously question whether these three will hold it together under this kind of pressure as it continues to mount.

So allow me to issue a preliminary RIP to Venu. We hardly knew ye. And if Fubo gets its way, we never will.

Also, This

🎾 Very excited to be heading to the U.S. Open this Monday. Still not sure who I’m seeing, but kinda doesn’t matter, right? We’re just early enough in the tournament that an American man could conceivably win the match I’m there for, so I think that’s what I’m pulling for. Come on, Fritz/Shelton/Paul/Tiafoe/Korda! Make me proud.

🏈 Private equity has officially come for the NFL. It’s a short list of approved buyers, and the stakes they’re capable of purchasing are still fairly small, but you can kinda see where this is going. The point is to further juice the valuations of these franchises, which is — surprise surprise — something the owners are inclined to allow. It sounds bad in the way that private equity acquisitions tend to sound bad in general. I don’t see a glaring problem here to be honest, unless you thought the majority owners were a roundly cool bunch of dudes prior to this. They’re stickin’ around, by the way, so don’t worry. They’ll just get a little richer now in return for losing their hold on this later. Good stuff.

🎙️ And wow, speaking of ca$h — how about that Wondery deal for the Kelce Bros.? Brings me back to when Spotify threw $20 million at Harry & Meghan. I thought those two numbers would be closer, actually, having not remembered what the figure was for the royals. $100M is serious friggin’ cheddar in the famously lucrative business of podcasting. Good for those guys.

🏐 More important than all of that, though, is the announcement that I was finally called up as an emergency sub for the North Brooklyn Baddies this week. As I told my usual sideline buddy after the game (match?), some HABs are meant to remain HABs, and I think I’ve got a piece of glass in my foot. But that’s a small price to pay for glory.