FuboTV, the company responsible for temporarily blocking the launch of Venu Sports (Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery’s sports streaming venture), very well may succeed in permanently keeping yet another competitor off the board.
But that doesn’t mean life will get any easier for the publicly traded OTT service that has seen its stock price drop more than 35% over the past 12 months.
“We have been hamstrung,” Fubo cofounder and CEO David Gandler said in a recent interview with Front Office Sports editor-in-chief Dan Roberts. “We’ve had not only our arms or hands tied behind our back, but our feet tied behind our back as well.”
FuboTV, whose streaming service is sports-centric, has fewer than two million subscribers, with plans starting at $79.99 a month. An ongoing fight with WBD—one-third of Venu—continues to keep key sports channels TNT, TBS, and truTV off the streaming platform. Despite a temporary stock price jump to over $2 in August after a judge stopped Venu from launching, Fubo shares are a whopping 95% off the highs of around $48 a share it hit in early 2021. Year-to-date Fubo stock is down 50%, while the broader market is up 21%.
“The stock remains or trades in a way that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Gandler said. “And the answer to that really is due to the predatory pricing that we’ve been dealing with, the monopolistic attempts to preclude us from really providing a package that’s similar to even what some of the other players out there have.”
Fubo, like many traditional cable TV providers, can offer customers only large, all-encompassing packages of channels, not bundles or even “skinny bundles” of sports-only content, for example. “We do want to be able to offer a Venu-like product,” Gandler said. “And our claim is we basically just want to operate on the same terms and conditions.”
A trial in the Venu case may not begin until October 2025, but Gandler is confident Fubo can eventually prevail. “Our goal is to really demonstrate the negative impact that these types of companies have had on the industry as a whole, particularly over the last 35 years,” he said. “And consumers have really paid the price for it.”
And of course, Venu Sports and battles with media-rights holders are not the only threats to Fubo these days. YouTube TV, which starts at $72.99 per month, now has more than eight million subscribers, and may be on pace to become the top U.S. pay-TV provider by 2026.
“It’s very difficult generally to compete with Google,” said Gandler, citing its wide variety of digital assets. “They are the internet, basically.”
