Disney and Fubo Team Up to Win Live TV

On Monday, Disney entered a marriage of convenience with its one-time legal foe, joining forces with Fubo, the cable-like internet-connected Pay TV provider. 

The deal puts an end to Fubo’s ongoing lawsuit that sought to block Disney’s efforts to build Venu Sports, its sports-only streaming joint venture with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Game On

Cable cord-cutting is table stakes in today’s TV industry. But some people — mostly a few million sports fans desperate to retain access to live broadcasts — still want cable-like services. They just don’t want them from traditional cable providers. Enter services like Fubo, YouTube TV, and Hulu+ Live TV, which essentially offer cable-like linear TV packages over the internet (at increasingly cable-like prices).

In fact, the market for sports-starved cable-cutters proved large enough that last year Disney, Fox, and WBD moved to service the cohort collectively via the yet-to-be-launched Venu Sports. The streaming JV will package together each media company’s sports-centric linear TV channels — so Fox Sports 1, the ESPN family of channels, and so on — in a livestreaming bundle priced at a skinnied-down $42.99, or roughly half the typical price for a standard cable package. It’s designed to be the perfect package for anyone wondering why they’re paying for 200 TV channels when they really only watch baseball and basketball. Soon after the Venu announcement, the sports-centric Fubo filed a lawsuit alleging that the creation of Venu Sports would violate antitrust law. By August, a US judge imposed a temporary injunction on the launch of Venu.

But with Monday’s announcement, Fubo’s lawsuit came to an end as it prepared to make a big splash by combining with Disney’s Hulu+ Live TV:

• The new company will have 6.2 million subscribers, making it the second-largest internet Pay TV provider behind YouTube TV, which Google says has more than 8 million subscribers.
• The properties will be held by the Fubo company, which will be 70% owned by Disney; on a call with investors Monday, Fubo executives said they expect revenue of around $7.5 billion by 2028, up from around $6 billion now, as well as $550 million in EBITDA. The Venu trio will also be paying Fubo an aggregate cash payment of $220 million to end the legal dispute, with Disney also offering a $145 million term loan in 2026.

What Channel is the Game On? For now, at least, Fubo says its service and Hulu+ Live Sports will remain seperate services. Venu, which will have much of the same content, will also presumably launch sometime this year. Disney also promises to launch a standalone ESPN streaming service in the near future. Which of course is not to be confused with streamer ESPN+, which can currently be bundled with Disney+ and Hulu. Which, of course, is not the same as Hulu+ Live TV — though it can all be bundled together. That’s progress, right?