Venu Sports, the combined effort by Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. to create a new sports streaming service, has been called off after multiple legal challenges prevented its launch. The news came out on Friday morning and was a surprise to most industry watchers as well as many at Venu itself, with employees getting word on Thursday night.
The streaming platform would have carried all the live sports assets from Fox, Disney, and Warner Bros, which included many games from the NFL, NCAA College Football, NBA, MLB, NHL, UFC, and other professional sports leagues.
The monthly subscription price it had announced was substantially lower than existing options for live sports from cable and streaming services. Venu’s failure eliminates a key competitor for these traditional sports programming providers.
Venu was originally announced in February and was viewed as a game changer in the live sports market, considering the wide range of programming that the three partners had committed to bring to the new platform. Any coverage gap would be compensated by the relatively low price of the service, luring sports fans away from higher-priced platforms.
However, as its development proceeded, Venu was hit with a series of challenges. Within the first month after Venu was announced, FuboTV filed a lawsuit against the joint venture partners claiming the new service would be extremely anti-competitive by squeezing out alternative providers. Courts ended up siding with FuboTV and agreed that Venu did violate antitrust laws.
While Venu ended up settling with FuboTV, DirectTV, and Dish quickly filed their lawsuits on antitrust grounds. Another setback came when Warner Bros. lost its broadcast right to the NBA, which had been seen as an anchor attraction for the new service.
In the end, these challenges led the partners to see Venu as a headache that was more trouble than it was worth, scrapping the project entirely.