Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox Finally Realized Venu Was a Terrible Idea
Venu Sports, the planned sports-centric streaming service that was a joint venture from ESPN (Disney), Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery will be “discontinued,” the companies said in a joint statement on Friday morning. Officially, it was a “collective decision,” media members were informed — if you choose to believe that.
“After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service,” the three-company statement reads. “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. We are proud of the work that has been done on Venu to date and grateful to the Venu staff, whom we will support through this transition period.”
Sorry about that whole thing, Venu staff, especially you, CEO Paul Distad.
Venu was probably a bad idea from the start, and we foretold its fate. (Ten days into 2025, and IndieWire has notched its first accurate prediction for the year!)
It seemed like Venu had some new life when Disney literally bought the trio’s way out of a Fubo lawsuit, one that had at least temporarily stopped Venu from launching. Disney, WBD, and Fox jointly paid Fubo $220 million to settle the dispute, but more were on the way.
Other video providers — most notably Echostar and DirecTV — stepped up to stop Venu. In separate letters (obtained by IndieWire) to the same judge who granted Fubo’s injunction request, Echostar and DirecTV argued against Venu’s “anticompetitive” nature.
Following the announcement that Venu Sports is caput, a DirecTV spokesperson emailed the following statement to IndieWire: “DIRECTV remains a leader in sports, and we look forward to working with our programming partners – including Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery – to compete on a level playing field to deliver sports fans more choice, control, and value all-in-one experience.”
The courts were not Venu’s only problem. Venu had felt D.O.A. to many of us the moment WBD lost the NBA to Amazon Prime Video. Save a few weeks of March Madness and some MLB Playoffs (which are not nothing), the NBA was about all that WBD was bringing to the table. Disney and Fox both have the NFL, which is the biggest game in town.
There was also this other weird wrinkle about Venu, one likely designed to proactively defend against foreseeable anti-competition lawsuits like Fubo’s: Venu Sports was intended to have a “finite” lifecycle, its owners said in court documents, lasting for just “a nine-year term.” Not coincidentally, that is when the NFL’s current TV and streaming rights deals end.
Still, who launches a streaming service with plans to shutter it? Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox do almost did.
Venu Sports was initially supposed to come to the market on August 23, 2024 at a price point of $42.99 per month. The idea, for Disney at least, was that Venu would serve as sort of a middle-ground option between a relatively cheap subscription ($11.99/month) to ESPN+, which is really just an additive service, and a pricier cable bundle that includes the ESPN linear channels, where the premium live sports can be consumed.
For WBD, Venu was a way into the NFL; for Fox, it was a risk-free way into streaming. Now it’s just an almost-was.
It was Disney that made the time-of-death call on Venu Sports, a person with knowledge of the situation told IndieWire. The other two fell in line — they didn’t really have a choice. Instead, the Venu JV companies will just continue their individual sports-programming journeys.
Disney plans to merge its Hulu + Live TV vMVPD service with Fubo, which leans into sports. The deal will allow Fubo to launch a Sports & Broadcast plan that will include Disney’s ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, and ESPNEWS channels, as well as ESPN+. Similar “skinny” bundles will be offered to other cable providers — like DirecTV — we’re told.
And this fall, ESPN is launching another standalone streaming service, with the internal project name of Flagship, that will mirror its cable channels. Flagship is expected to cost $25-$30 a month, and it was happening with or without Venu. Forget cord “cutting;” Flagship will take a chainsaw to the cords of many cable customers.
WBD has been tacking on any sports rights that it possibly can to fill its NBA-sized hole. It also recently announced that pro-wrestling promotion AEW will finally start streaming on its Max service. “AEW Dynamite” (Wednesdays on TBS) and “AEW Collision” (Saturdays on TNT) will be simulcast live on the former HBO Max, a move fans have been clamoring for since All Elite Wrestling started.
Fox has stayed lean and mean since selling most of its assets to Disney. It does sports and news, and it does them well — and now, it will continue to do them independently.
