The Sports Bundle is Expensive, Incomplete, and Incoherent
Since it was first announced, the price for Venu, the weirdly-named "Sports Bundle" from Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros Discovery, was rumored to be in the $40 - $50 range, so the fact that it's $42.99 is not a surprise. Still, it's different seeing it confirmed in the wild for some reason. This feels too expensive to me. And I'm hardly alone, here's Brian Steinberg for Variety:
Streaming sports on a stand-alone basis won’t be cheap.
Venu, the streaming joint venture backed by Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery and built around the sports offerings of all three companies, will launch with an initial price tag of $42.99 per month. The service is expected to debut in the fall in conjunction with the start of the next NFL season.
I mean, I get it, but I don't. And I won't. I know it's not for me. But who is this for?
“With an impressive portfolio of sports programming, Venu will provide sports fans in the U.S. with a single destination for watching many of the most sought-after games and events,” said Pete Distad, CEO of the new outlet, in a statement. “We’re building Venu from the ground up for fans who want seamless access to watch the sports they love, and we will launch at a compelling price point that will appeal to the cord cutter and cord never fans currently not served by existing pay TV packages.”
I went ahead and highlighted the keyword in there. "Many". If this bundle offered all of sports in one cohesive, easy-to-use package, than sure. But as it stands, this may just further muddle the market. Namely because CBS, NBC, Amazon, and Netflix, all of which have their own NFL deals, are not included. Also, you may have heard that Warner's TNT just lost the NBA rights to NBC and Amazon after this year. If nothing else, you're going to need rabbit ears for the networks and subscriptions to Amazon and Netflix for the rest.
Granted, many households are likely to have the latter two already because Netflix is the most popular streaming service and Amazon bundles their offering with Prime. But still, there are plenty of households which won't have one or both of those. And are they also going to bust out the rabbit ears for a good number of games while at the same time paying $42.99/month for just "many" games? Or paying for Peacock on top of those? Or Paramount+? At that point, you're certainly better off just buying YouTube TV.
The first time the one game you want to watch on Venu isn't there, how pissed are you going to be? Enough to throw the rabbit ears through the window? Don't do that – you'll need those!
I'm sure the partners did the legwork here to figure out just how big of a market this in-between product will actually serve. But I'm very curious just how big that market really is... And if, for an audience that is clearly price sensitive, $42.99/month seems okay? That's such a comically specific number that it's clearly the absolute minimum they felt like they could get away with. "Look, it's below the $45 - $50/month we floated!" type of thing. But it still feels like a lot for "cord-nevers". Maybe it entices some would-be "cord-cutters"? But that's also not what anyone wants to be enticing here?
Also, is there a market for truly generic sports fans? I mean, there is a market for people who like sports, obviously. I'm in that market. But I, like everyone else, have the sports I actually really care about and would pay for. The rest are fine, but I'm probably not going to watch them, let alone pay to watch them. I would rather pay to get all the games from the sports I do care about, or at least the teams I care about. This is not that. Perhaps this is targeted at Rob Lowe?1
Maybe if users can easily cancel after, say, the NFL season is over – that would certainly beat the nearly $80/month some pay for YouTube TV or similar services right now and cancel after that one season they care about is over. But again, this is going to require more work to get everything. And clearly they're hoping to entice those people to stick around by promising to lock in the $42.99/month price for a year. Which at the same time implies that it will be going up!
Which, of course it will! YouTube TV started at $35/month. In just six years, it has more than doubled in price. Yes, they've added more content, but come on. I'd rather have the content I started with and still be paying $35/month.2 All of these things jump in price, quickly. Venu is going to be $60/month before we know it. Then $75/month.
Also awkward: Disney is clearly the anchor partner here, bringing ABC and ESPN content and channels to the table, but they're also gearing up to launch their own stand-alone streaming version of ESPN next year. So this has always felt like a stop-gap sports streaming offering. Again, they'll say this is servicing a market that isn't served right now, and the new ESPN won't serve that market either. But how granular are we going to get with these offerings? It's all pretty confusing already!3 Have I mentioned that stand-alone streaming ESPN will be different from ESPN+?
Also, also, awkward: Venu was created when Warner Bros Discovery still had those aforementioned NBA rights and presumably everyone involved here thought they'd be retaining them. Yes, WBD has some other sports to bring to the table, but beyond the college football they're being gifted by Disney (itself sort of weird), nothing really compares to the NBA. Venu is going to be very light on the NBA after this year. Disney will bring their package and that's it. It will also be a bit light on the NFL. The league that will matter most here because it matter the most everywhere.
And so I ask again, who is this for?
It's like a half-attempt at what I think we'd all want: a unified sports streaming service, with all content served up in a great UI so we could easily get to the games we wanted to see, when we wanted to see them. That's sort of what I wondered if Apple would be doing in the space. But I also laid this out as what Disney should do with ESPN a couple years ago:
All of the streaming cable replacement services are now more or less the same — and looking a lot more like traditional cable in price on down these days — so a focus on sports for Hulu’s service could remain a smart selling point and they should double-down on it. They should create a new UI that aggregates all the games you want to watch in a smart way. (Something which we’re all increasingly longing for in an era of increasing content fragmentation.) This is a natural place for ads, ads, ads, ads, ads, which Disney must appreciate. And they can upsell the other services that offers some sports, such as Amazon for some of their NFL games and Apple TV+ for their MLB and MLS games. Again, in the past this would have seemed impossible, but now it’s a standard business practice.
In other words, if you can't offer the full sports bundle,4 at least make a nice UI to make it seem like you are. Maybe Venu will do that, we'll see. But right now it just sounds like an incoherent offering that will ultimately confuse and annoy people.
1 Wait, clearly not as clearly Rob Lowe loves all of the NFL. Meaning all the games. Not just the ones on Disney and Fox properties. Rob Lowe is not only signing up for YouTube TV, he's getting Sunday Ticket, obviously. Sorry, Venu.
2 Venu gets me closer to that price point I guess, but I also want more than just the sports content for that price! Again, this obviously isn't for me. Which is fine! But who is it for?
3 A just wait until they start bundling Venu with Disney+ and Max and both...
4 The unstated reality here: even if you could get all those networks and their sports rights, it would probably a service that was more expensive than YouTube TV at that point!