\n<\/p>\n
Venu came. It saw. It did not conquer.<\/p>\n
Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. said on Friday that their forthcoming sports streaming service \u2014 which was announced to great fanfare<\/a> last year before being buffeted by legal challenges \u2014 would be discontinued.<\/p>\n The service had been given a name (Venu Sports), a management team (led by the former Apple executive Pete Distad) and a target launch date (Aug. 23, 2024), but that date passed and little else had been said publicly by the companies until the news that the joint venture was ending.<\/p>\n \u201cIn an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels,\u201d the companies said in a statement.<\/p>\n Venu Sports was a curious offering that seemed to be a bridge between the old cable bundle and the new world of \u00e0 la carte streaming services. By combining the sports content of the three companies, along with some non-sports shows, it was made for the fan who liked sports enough to pay $42.99 per month for a bundled streaming service but did not want to pay $80 per month or more for the full cable bundle, which would include channels like NBC, CBS and USA that also show a lot of sports.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was never given a chance to see if there was a big enough audience for that kind of offering.<\/p>\n Just two weeks after the joint venture was announced, the companies were sued by Fubo<\/a>, a niche streaming service that focuses on distributing live sports, which claimed the companies were engaging in anticompetitive behavior. When Fubo wanted to distribute the companies\u2019 sports channels, it had to pay for and also distribute the companies\u2019 non-sports channels like Nat Geo Wild and the Cartoon Network, but they allowed Venu to distribute only their sports channels.<\/p>\n A federal judge agreed this was anticompetitive behavior. In August, a week before Venu was scheduled to go live, Judge Margaret Garnett for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted Fubo an injunction.<\/p>\n In her ruling, she wrote that Fubo would have likely succeeded in a trial demonstrating that Venu \u201cwill substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in contravention of this country\u2019s antitrust laws.\u201d<\/p>\n As late as this week, however, it still looked as if Venu was on track for a delayed start.<\/p>\n