Last month, we reported on what was a pretty sudden, and pretty massive, setback for some companies that normally get to act like they own large chunks of the media landscape, because they, uh, do: Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox having their plans to launch a giant sports streaming service get shut down by a New York judge, after streaming competitor Fubo brought an antitrust suit against them. That scuttled plans last month to launch Venu Sports, which would have basically taken every network those three companies own that runs sports—ESPN, Fox, ABC, TNT, and TBS—and offered them as a single streaming package for $42.99 a month.
Now, that same judge has set a trial date for the antitrust suit, and, yeah, you're probably not going to be watching this thing anytime soon. Thanks to massive amounts of research and discovery that go into antitrust lawsuits, the trial isn't set to begin until October of 2025. Disney, WBD, and Fox could hypothetically get the injunction appealed before them, allowing them to launch, but the shifting sands of sports streaming licensing deals have already begun to suck at this thing in a pretty serious way. (Disney has already announced its plans to offer an ESPN-exclusive streaming package in the time before the trial even starts, while Warner Bros. has lost its rights to the NBA starting in 2025, so whatever arcane scaffolding of deals was holding these three giant companies together is already looking kind of creaky.)
All of this comes, of course, amidst the other giant fight Disney is having right now over who carries what to whom, as its channels remain blacked out on satellite provider DirecTV. (Including the memorable bit from earlier this week when Disney offered, in a spirit of public-minded magnanimity, to let DirecTV customers view the presidential debate on ABC despite the ongoing fight, which the satellite TV company refused.) And all of this comes back to the issue of network bundling, which is going to become one of the main issues as streaming slowly, inexorably, turns itself right back into cable. What's bundling, you ask? Ah, dear reader: Join us, won't you, in the Okay, What's Bundling, Actually? Sidebar!
Welcome to the Okay, What's Bundling, Actually? Sidebar! Basically, a company like Disney knows that not all of its channels have equal amounts of demand, and certainly not to the same people—so when they cut deals with providers like DirecTV, they include a bunch of rules that say anyone who buys access to, say, ESPN, also has to pay to get several other channels they don't want or care about. Everyone who isn't one of the big companies hates this (because it inflates prices for crap you don't want), which is why DirecTV has been trying lately to put together genre-specific network bundles to give consumers more flexibility and lower prices. But that runs smack into these bundle demands, hence the fights and blackouts. At the same time, part of the core of Fubo's argument against Disney and its cohorts in the Venu case is that, even as the three companies are basically turning themselves into their own online cable company by setting up plans to stream their own networks, they're also letting themselves off the hook for bundling requirements by directly offering sports consumers only the channels they want. It's a big part of why Venu was going to launch at that (relatively) low pricepoint; no extra unwanted networks getting shoved in, just the sports that sports brains crave.
All of which is, admittedly, a little technical, and a lot messy, but there's literally billions of dollars wrapped up in these fights right now, and will be for the foreseeable future. Fascinatingly, the Fubu/Venu lawsuit is likely to shed light on even more of this stuff. The discovery process on the lawsuit is expected to go heavily into how Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox set up their carriage deals; the upshot of which is that we're likely about to see how some very expensive sausage gets made.
