Judge blocks joint sports streaming venture from Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox

A judge in New York has blocked the launch of a planned joint venture on streamed live sports by some of the nation’s largest legacy media companies.

The planned venture, dubbed Venu, would provide a direct-to-consumer streaming platform offering NFL, NHL and NBA games and more from leading media companies like Disney, which owns ESPN, Warner Bros. Discovery, which operates Turner Sports, and Fox, which is home to some of the biggest NFL and college football games each year.

The companies were targeting a rollout of the product this month, with a subscription running consumers almost $50 per month.

Shortly after plans for the venture were announced this spring, Fubo, a live TV streaming platform that offers consumers a sports-first package that it bills as a less expensive alternative to traditional cable bundles, sued the companies for what it said was anti-competitive behavior.

“Because Fubo is likely to be successful in proving its claims that the JV will violate this country’s antitrust laws, because Fubo and American consumers will face irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction, and because the equities and the public interest weigh in favor of preserving the status quo pending full and fair adjudication of all issues in this matter,” U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett wrote in her Friday ruling.

There have been signs for months the project was likely to run into regulatory hurdles amid the legacy scrutiny from competitors and pushback from critics.

The planned venture sparked a recent letter from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who also raised concerns about how the endeavor could have negatively affected prices for consumers of live sports.

“This massive new sports streaming company would be poised to control more than 80% of nationally broadcast sports and more than half of all national sports content, putting it in a position to exercise monopoly power over televised sports,” a group of lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) wrote to the Department of Justice last week.

Live sports remain the single largest driver of audience for each of the nation’s leading media companies.

Major tech companies like Netflix, Amazon and Apple, meanwhile, have invested billions of dollars in live sports content as legacy broadcasters take billions of dollars in markdowns on linear channels and advertising revenue for cable continues to decline.

DirecTV, one of the largest cable providers in the country, celebrated the news of the judge’s Friday ruling.

“We are pleased with the court decision and believe that it appropriately recognizes the potential harms of allowing major programmers to license their content to an affiliated distributor on more favorable terms than they license their content to third parties,” the company said.