Venu Sports Website Goes Offline Forever
In February 2024, three of the biggest media companies in the world teamed up to create a giant sports streaming service. By August, those giants met their match in a lawsuit from a tiny live TV streaming service. Now, the evidence of that project is being swept off the internet.
Early last year, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a joint venture called Venu Sports. It would cost $42.99/month.
Venu would have all the sports provided by those companies’ linear channels, including MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL and WNBA, MLS, NWSL, and U.S. and international men’s and women’s soccer coverage. Venu would offer NCAA football, NCAA men’s and women’s basketball, motor sports including NASCAR and Formula 1 events, Grand Slam tennis, golf, boxing, and MMA. Users would also see all three of horse racing’s Triple Crown events, cycling, the Premiere Lacrosse League, and coverage of Major League Rugby.
Venu would also include ABC, ESPN, ESPN+, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNEWS, Fox, FS1, FS2, ACC Network, SEC Network, Big Ten Network, TNT, TBS, and truTV.
But that offer proved too good to be true. On August 16, 2024, Fubo won a preliminary injunction against the media giants. A judge agreed it was unfair for those companies to offer a bundle of 60%-80% of live broadcast sports content while live TV streamers like Fubo were unable to pick and choose which sports and channels they offer. (Disney forces carriers to pay for channels they may not want like Freeform and Disney XD if they want ESPN.)
After the injunction, Venu’s website switched from language promising a fall ’24 launch to “coming soon.” It seemed the companies were looking for a way around the judge’s ruling. Even if Disney, FOX, and Warner Bros. Discovery found a way to appease Fubo, future lawsuits would surely come from other providers like DIRECTV STREAM or Sling TV.
On January 6, 2025, Disney announced it was throwing in the towel, combining its Hulu + Live TV business with Fubo and giving control of that company to Fubo co-founder and CEO David Gandler.
Four days later, ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery released a joint statement:
“After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service. 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.”
Throughout the lawsuit and the injunction and the fallout of that ruling, the Venu website still scrolled its hopeful “coming soon” message. But today, the site shows nothing.
In the aftermath, services like DIRECTV STREAM have started offering smaller channel bundles and Fox is said to be working on its own direct-to-consumer streaming service. The biggest loser in the deal appears to be Warner Bros. Discovery, which not only lost the opportunity to gain revenue from Venu, but also lost its rights to the NBA starting next season.
Ultimately, sports appears to be the only thing keeping live TV afloat. In 2024, 75 of the 100 most-watched primetime telecasts were sports. Linear channels like Comedy Central and MTV are all but abandoned to reruns. Media companies seem to be pushing all their chips into streaming. So broadcasters desperate for advertiser-friendly sports keep driving prices for league rights higher and higher. Streaming-first companies like Netflix Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix are also taking nibbles out of the sports landscape.
We don’t know how this will all shake out. ESPN’s upcoming standalone streamer will be interesting to watch. But with Venu’s demise, the trend seems to be more confusion and higher prices.
