Venu Sports Is Dead, but Its Skinny Bundle Blueprint Powers On

Venu Sports is dead. Long live Venu Sports—sort of.

The high-profile but embattled streaming service threw in the towel Friday, formally discontinuing after never going live. The spirit of Venu Sports, however, as well as a meaningful portion of its planned content, will live on in a sports-centric skinny bundle contemplated by Fubo Inc. in its new joint venture with ESPN parent company Disney. 

The large-scale deal announced last week—in which Disney will acquire a majority stake in the rival streamer and Fubo operations will be combined with those of Hulu + Live TV—included a new carriage agreement for numerous ESPN networks and “allow Fubo to create a new sports & broadcast service.”

That forthcoming bundle may very well be aided by Fox Sports content, too. Last week, Fubo said it reached an amended distribution agreement with Fox, suggesting programming from that network could also be involved.

There are still plenty of details to work out, and it’s also not yet known whether this planned skinny sports bundle will have a price similar to the $42.99 per month contemplated for Venu Sports. The essence of what was envisioned before with Venu Sports, though, will likely still reach the public—just in a different way. 

“We’ve been very focused over the last three weeks on amending our [carriage] agreements to allow us to create these skinnier bundles,” said Fubo cofounder and CEO David Gandler after reaching the Disney pact. “We still have other programming deals, and we have to work through those as well.”

Warner Bros. Discovery, the other partner of Venu Sports, currently does not have a carriage agreement with Fubo. It does, however, have one with Hulu + Live TV. It will bear close watching whether the combined entity and the greater marketplace scale it now creates with more than 6.2 million total subscribers, results in an altered deal there. 

A Cleaner Market

The demise of Venu undoubtedly provides a simpler marketplace presence for Disney and ESPN, which already have ESPN+, this new alliance with Fubo, and the forthcoming direct-to-consumer “Flagship” version of ESPN that Disney CEO Bob Iger has called “the best product the consumer has ever seen in sports.” That latter project is unquestionably the primary streaming priority for ESPN. 

The recent developments are also perhaps a big win for Fox, which has had a less pronounced streaming strategy than many other major media entities and could benefit greatly from this retooled strategy led by Fubo. 

“No other company stands the most to gain from the testing of the Venu-thesis that there is an appetite out there for skinnier bundles, especially with a sports/news focus, that achieves meaningful price differentiation by dropping longer-tail networks, as compared to a full-fledged [virtual multichannel video programming distributor] offering like YouTube TV,” wrote MoffettNathanson senior analyst Robert Fishman in a research note.