Venu came. It saw. It did not conquer.
Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. said on Friday that their forthcoming sports streaming service — which was announced to great fanfare last year before being buffeted by legal challenges — would be discontinued.
The service had been given a name (Venu Sports), a management team (led by the former Apple executive Pete Distad) and a target launch date (Aug. 23, 2024), but that date passed and little else had been said publicly by the companies until the news that the joint venture was ending.
“In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels,” the companies said in a statement.
Venu Sports was a curious offering that seemed to be a bridge between the old cable bundle and the new world of à la carte streaming services. By combining the sports content of the three companies, along with some non-sports shows, it was made for the fan who liked sports enough to pay $42.99 per month for a bundled streaming service but did not want to pay $80 per month or more for the full cable bundle, which would include channels like NBC, CBS and USA that also show a lot of sports.
It was never given a chance to see if there was a big enough audience for that kind of offering.
Just two weeks after the joint venture was announced, the companies were sued by Fubo, a niche streaming service that focuses on distributing live sports, which claimed the companies were engaging in anticompetitive behavior. When Fubo wanted to distribute the companies’ sports channels, it had to pay for and also distribute the companies’ non-sports channels like Nat Geo Wild and the Cartoon Network, but they allowed Venu to distribute only their sports channels.
A federal judge agreed this was anticompetitive behavior. In August, a week before Venu was scheduled to go live, Judge Margaret Garnett for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted Fubo an injunction.
In her ruling, she wrote that Fubo would have likely succeeded in a trial demonstrating that Venu “will substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in contravention of this country’s antitrust laws.”
As late as this week, however, it still looked as if Venu was on track for a delayed start.
On Monday, Disney said it was combining its Hulu live television business with Fubo, forming a company that will have 6.2 million live television subscribers. That would make it the country’s sixth-largest pay television distributor. Disney will own 70 percent of the new company.
Fubo and the joint venture partners petitioned the court to dismiss the lawsuit, and that was granted on Wednesday. But a day later, the satellite television providers DirecTV and EchoStar wrote letters to the judge, imploring her to preserve her findings in the case.
“By this settlement, defendants pay off and seek to subsume the very competitor that raised these antitrust violations to the court,” DirecTV wrote in its letter, in which it also said it was evaluating “its options with respect to the joint venture,” a thinly veiled suggestion that it too could sue.
A day later, Venu Sports was dead.
But new streaming sports options will continue. Disney-owned ESPN will debut its flagship streaming service this year, the first time fans will be able to get ESPN channels without having to buy the cable bundle.
