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Disney is illegally abusing ESPN’s dominance in live sports, a smaller rival claimed in a recent court filing.
“Disney is far more powerful than the cute mouse logo suggests,” Dish Network said in antitrust counterclaims filed in New York federal court Friday in response to an August lawsuit from Disney. Dish claims that Disney requires it to pay “hundreds of millions of dollars every year in excess fees for content that Dish’s customers do not watch.”
The counterclaims—which contain 12 counts, including attempted monopolization and unreasonable restraint of trade—allege that Disney is using ESPN’s popularity to force distributors into bloated, expensive channel bundles while blocking them from offering cheaper, sports-focused alternatives.
According to Dish, Disney has attempted to monopolize the market for live sports distribution by leveraging its “staggering” control over premium sports rights—including major NFL and NBA events like the Super Bowl and NBA Finals—to impose strict bundling requirements on distributors.
Three different times over the last year, Disney has tried to “create a distribution platform at the expense of its own distributors (and their customers)” that provides so-called “skinny sports bundles” that Disney bars other distributors from offering, Dish says.
The suit cites the Fubo/Venu saga as one of the examples. In February 2024, Fubo—a small sports distributor—sued Disney to block the introduction of Venu Sports, a joint sports streaming venture among ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Fubo succeeded in stopping the Venu launch, and the case was still ongoing last January when Disney bought Fubo. The suit was subsequently dropped. The U.S. Department of Justice probed the transaction for potential anticompetitive effects before clearing the deal in October.
Dish’s counterclaims are in response to Disney’s suit that cried foul over the launch of short-term “Day Pass” offerings by Dish-owned Sling TV. Day Pass let subscribers buy one-day, weekend, or one-week access to ESPN and other Disney channels. Disney argues those passes violated long-standing carriage agreements that require monthly subscriptions. The Dish offerings give customers the ability to buy a Sling TV package that includes ESPN and ESPN2 for either $4.99 for one day, $9.99 for a weekend, or $14.99 for an entire week.
Dish does not dispute that it launched the passes in August, and it also concedes that some promotional materials incorrectly advertised the passes as available “with no subscription.” But it says it had no contractual obligation to seek approval from Disney for the offerings, and it bills Disney’s suit as part of a broader effort to preserve its anticompetitive stranglehold on the market for skinny sports bundles.
“Dish’s counterclaims have no merit and are nothing more than a tactic to distract from their own misconduct, and we look forward to vindicating our position in court,” a Disney spokesperson told Front Office Sports.
