Venu Sports Died the Week Disney Made a Deal With Its Plaintiff

Venu Sports never aired a single game. It had a CEO, a brand name, a price tag and a legal team, and never a broadcast. That is the short history of how three of the biggest names in sports TV announced a streaming bundle and watched it die before the first kickoff.

Update, October 2026: The partners did end up selling sports bundles, just separately. ESPN and Fox launched their own streaming services on August 21, 2025, and an ESPN + Fox One bundle at $39.99 a month followed on October 2, 2025, TheWrap reported. That is less than the $42.99 Venu was priced at, though Venu would have carried TNT and TBS too.

The Bundle Nobody Got to Buy

Disney’s ESPN, Fox Corporation and Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT Sports announced the joint venture on February 6, 2024, each taking an equal third. The pitch was a single subscription bundling their national sports networks, about 14 channels including ESPN, FS1, TNT and TBS, for viewers who had cut cable but still wanted live sports. Pete Distad, formerly of Apple and Hulu, was named CEO in March. The Venu name arrived on May 16. On August 1, the price was set at $42.99 a month, locked in for 12 months, with cancellation allowed at any time.

The Court Said No

The opposition came from the courts. Fubo sued in February, arguing that three companies that normally compete for rights would instead coordinate on distribution and squeeze smaller players like Fubo. DirecTV endorsed Fubo’s case after the ruling, and it joined Dish and Newsmax in a May coalition letter to the Senate Commerce Committee. On August 16, Judge Margaret Garnett granted Fubo a preliminary injunction, finding it likely to succeed in showing the venture would “substantially lessen competition.” The three companies said they would appeal. The launch was blocked.

Then the Premise Changed

Then the premise changed. On January 6, 2025, Disney and Fubo announced that Fubo would combine with Hulu + Live TV, with Disney taking a 70% stake, and that Fubo had settled all of its litigation with Disney and ESPN over Venu. Four days later, Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery said they had “collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service,” citing “an ever-changing marketplace,” according to SVG. On Disney’s February 5 earnings call, CEO Bob Iger said that once skinnier bundles emerged, Venu “basically looked redundant to us.” He called the Fubo combination a great opportunity to make ESPN available on multiple skinny bundles, TheWrap reported. The combination closed in October 2025.

Read that sequence again. The company that sued to stop Venu did not simply win. It ended up majority-owned by one of Venu’s three partners. A federal judge blocked the launch, Disney settled with the plaintiff by folding Hulu + Live TV into it, and the shared product became, in Iger’s word, redundant, all within five months of the ruling. Whether anyone wanted the bundle was never tested, because nobody got to buy it. What the record does show is how the partners ranked their priorities: the joint venture was dropped within days of one partner finding another route to the same goal, getting its own network into the bundles other people were already building, and that route ran through the plaintiff.

VDG Sports, where Vince Douglas Gregory writes about the business and culture of sports, will keep reading the fine print on the bundles.

Vince Douglas Gregory

Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
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