On Friday, Fubo won a rare preliminary injunction against Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, preventing the trio of media-entertainment conglomerates from launching their sports streaming joint venture, Venu Sports, this fall as planned.
Also read: Venu Sports JV Put in Peril as Judge Grants Fubo’s Request for Preliminary Injunction
While that's certainly the headline, Fubo's full annotated antitrust lawsuit -- which can be downloaded courtesy of LightShed Partners equity analyst Richard Greenfield's blog -- represents a treasure trove of undiscovered facts. Among them:
* Disney ESPN, long far and away the most expensive linear channel in the pay TV ecosystem, now has an average monthly price of $9.42 a subscriber. That compares to around $3 a month for WBD's TNT, and $3.50 - $8 a month for regional sports networks, according to Fubo's suit. While the ESPN number seems astronomical, it's the same "$9.42" figure reported by S&P Global Market Intelligence a year ago.
* Venu Sports, which seeks to bundle 15 of its parent companies' linear sports channels, gestated when Disney approached Fox about licensing its sports programming for its upcoming direct-to-consumer launch of ESPN, codename "Flagship." Fox counter-proposed the idea of a JV. "Serendipitously, around this same time WBD also approached Fox about a similar streaming joint venture," the suit said. Ultimately, all three JV Defendants undertook discussions and negotiations, during which they referred to the incipient JV with the codename 'Raptor.'"
* Despite the fact that Disney owns more in the way of sports rights vs. both Fox and WBD, the JV is described as an egalitarian alliance of equal partners, each owning 33.333%. Notably, unlike their MVPD and vMPVD partners, which only get a portion of ad time, Venu Sports principals would retain 100% of the advertising revenue they generate on their channels via the Venu platform.
* The Venu principals are operating under a non-compete agreement stipulating that JV doesn't prohibit them from licensing their sports channels to MVPD distributors, but they can't create or enter a similar sports-centric joint venture.
* Venu's benefactors projected that it would reach 5 million subscribers by 2028. How did they arrive at this number? "That number is based only on a comparison to Hulu + Live TV and tends to contradict the JV Defendants’ own commissioned research studies which indicate that a skinny sports offering like the JV will have significantly broader appeal," Fubo said in its suit.
