Before a federal judge granted a temporary injunction last month that FuboTV sought against Venu Sports, the three media giants behind Venu warned that such a decision would “terminate the joint venture.”
But in the one month since the injunction was granted, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery have not abandoned Venu. The trio has pushed forward with an appeal and is preparing for a trial as part of the same antitrust case Fubo launched days after the joint venture was first announced (minus a name, pricing structure, or launch date) in February.
“If they were going to kill it, wouldn’t they have done it already?” says Brandon Ross, a partner at LightShed Partners, who adds that Disney “is the de facto leader of this group since they have the most sports rights.”
DirecTV—which came to an agreement with Disney over the weekend after a two-week carriage dispute—threw its support behind Fubo’s lawsuit. Fubo’s argument is it’s competitively unfair for Disney to license just its sports channels to its own joint venture when it won’t do the same for other pay-TV apps. To offer Fubo subscribers ESPN, Fubo must also take on National Geographic, Toon Disney, and other Disney-owned nonsports channels.
Meanwhile, streamed sports content exists across disparate platforms due to the fragmented landscape of which companies have which live sports rights.
“You have to have some kind of bundling,” former Fox Sports exec Patrick Crakes tells Front Office Sports. “Somebody does need to figure it out because, right now, the way the entertainment side balances out [the losses] is cutting spending on producing content. That hasn’t impacted sports yet, but it doesn’t take a lot of scientists to see that it might taper rights fees growth in the future.”
Disney, Fox, and WBD went against the norm by breaking out just their sports content for Venu, which Fubo claimed in a recent filing was done “to exploit the market power of those combined rights as a monopoly product” since Venu would boast “60-80% of US live sports streaming rights.”
DirecTV CMO Vince Torres, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia summit Thursday, again voiced DirecTV’s support for Fubo’s effort.
“That’s a genre offering that we believe is good for consumers that we want to offer to [our] consumers,” he said of Venu’s sports content bundling. “I want to be able to do the same. I want to be able to deliver that type of product, whether it’s exactly that or something [similar]. … It’s the genre of sports, how do I serve that to consumers without the obligation to also have to give it to customers that don’t want it? The joint venture doesn’t have that obligation. What makes it anticompetitive is the fact that they’re forcing others to do things that they don’t have to do.”
So what happens next? For how long will Disney, Fox, and WBD dig their heels in, for a legal fight that could drag into 2026.
According to an appeals court filing from last month, Fox had “127 employees dedicated to Venu” ahead of the planned launch at the end of August.
“We had anticipated that Venu would launch at the beginning of the NFL and college football season,” lawyers for the joint venture partners wrote in an Aug. 23 motion for an expedited appeal to the injunction. “The preliminary injunction has shattered those expectations and placed our new platform in limbo.”
Disney did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
While Judge Margaret M. Garnett in the Southern District Court of New York enjoined the launch of Venu with her ruling Aug. 16, there wasn’t a stay issued in the case. (A stay would have paused discovery and other progress in the civil case until the appeal is complete.) Last week, Garnett set an October 2025 trial date; the case will proceed while the joint venture partners seek to get the injunction overturned by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. The Venu partners have requested a December hearing in front of the 2nd Circuit, which, if granted, leaves a chance the appeals panel could rule in time for the Super Bowl.
With legal costs mounting along with other expenses, could one of the Venu trio blink? Disney, which is preparing to launch its direct-to-consumer ESPN streaming app later this year, looks likeliest.
LightShed’s Ross points out when Disney, Fox, and WBD first announced the app that would become Venu in February, Disney was dealing with activist investor Nelson Peltz, “and they were trying to do everything to make it look like they had a plan.”
Disney CEO Bob Iger won the proxy fight with Peltz in April, and a month later the billionaire sold his stake in the company. Disney, for now, hasn’t given any indication it will abandon Venu, and neither has WDB or Fox.
Even if Venu gets the necessary court victories and launches, it will lack half of the NFL Sunday afternoon games (CBS/Paramount+), Thursday Night Football (Amazon), half the NASCAR schedule (NBC/Peacock), and most of the national NBA games beginning in 2025 (NBC/Peacock and Amazon), among other sports properties.
“To me, as a consumer, it’s sort of an incomplete service,” NBCUniversal Media Group chairman Mark Lazarus said about Venu onstage at last week’s Front Office Sports Tuned In summit in New York. “It doesn’t have all sports. It has three companies’ sports, but that leaves out us, and Paramount, and Amazon, who have major sports portfolios or growing sports portfolios, and multitudes of other places that sports come in.”
