Venu Sports, the planned sports-centric streaming service from ESPN (Disney), Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery will be “discontinued,” the companies said in a joint statement on Friday morning. It was a “collective decision,” media members were informed, and is “effective immediately.”
“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.
Venu was a bad idea from the start. Ten days into 2025, and IndieWire has notched its first accurate prediction for the year.
But it almost seemed like Venu had a bit of 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. Venu Sports was initially supposed to come to the market on August 23, 2024 (in time for the NFL season, baseball playoffs, etc.) at a price point of $42.99 per month.
The granted Fubo injunction wasn’t the only roadblock in place. Venu had felt D.O.A. to many of us the moment that 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. Making matters even more confusing, Disney’s ESPN already has standalone (and bundle-able) streaming service ESPN+, and it plans to launch another ESPN streaming platform in the near future. Why, we have no idea.
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.”
Huh? What? Who launches a streaming service with plans to shutter it?
It was weird, but not without explanation. For starters, the NFL’s current 10-year TV rights deal expires in, you guessed it, about nine years. So who knows what primo properties Venu Sports would and would not have in 2033 — especially now that Netflix is in the NFL business.
But that’s not all!
“Arguing that it is finite is evidence that it does not have a catastrophic impact on competition in the market, but the counter argument is that it can be extended or renewed or renegotiated,” Bryan Sullivan, a partner with Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae (an uninvolved law firm), told IndieWire at the time. “Saying in a pleading that the contract is finite and pointing to that language about being finite in the agreement is true, but does not bind them from never amending, modifying, extending, or superseding that agreement with a new agreement.”
This thing was never going to work — not even with Fubo out of the way. More 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.
Disney, WBD, and Fox jointly paid Fubo $220 million to settle its anti-competition lawsuit. Clearly, more were on the way.
So Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, and Fox decided to just take the “L.” That doesn’t mean they’re walking away from sports streaming, however.
With its purchase of Fubo, 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+. Disney will own 70 percent of the combined Hulu + Live TV and Fubo, which will be called Fubo and be run by the current Fubo management team. Disney gets to select the board of directors.
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 its TBS) and “AEW Collision” (Saturdays on its TNT) will be simulcast live on the former HBO Max, which fans have been clamoring for since All Elite Wrestling started. (It was also totally illogical that AEW wasn’t streaming…somewhere.)
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.