Venu Sports was supposed to exist by now.
The ESPN-Fox-WBD joint venture streaming service had planned to launch on or around August 23 , just in time for college football and NFL season. However, when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the service in Fubo’s lawsuit, that put the brakes on the service indefinitely.
At the time, ESPN released a statement saying it disagreed with the ruling and planned to appeal. Since then, however, we haven’t heard too much about how the injunction might impact plans.
While he certainly couldn’t get into the legal issues, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro discussed the state of Venu during an appearance on John Ourand’s The Varsity podcast .
There’s only so much I can say about Venu specifically,” Pitaro told Ourand when the two spoke at ESPN’s media day last Wednesday. “But I do want to say that we do respectfully disagree with the court’s decision, and we are appealing it. We have filed a notice of appeal.”
Pitaro launched into a defense of why Venu Sports isn’t worthy of antitrust concern and exists to give “cord nevers” and similar sports fans a streaming service that makes sense for them.
“We do stand behind the fact that we believe that this is a pro-competitive service that’s going to present consumers with another choice,” said Pitaro. “It is really focused on sports fans that are not currently part of the MVPD ecosystem, either because they’ve cut the cord or never subscribed.”
That echoes a similar statement made by Fox’s Lachman Murdoch earlier in the year regarding Venu’s appeal.
Ourand pushed the ESPN chairman to explain why the company is focused on Venu when they have their “Flagship” direct-to-consumer product coming down the road , presumably next year .
“ESPN is primarily in the market in two ways from a distribution perspective,” said Pitaro. “The first, of course, is as a part of the broad cable or satellite bundle. The second is ESPN+, which was launched in April of 2018. That was launched for a couple of reasons… It was launched to be a complementary service to what’s on linear, understanding that we can’t have everything on linear, but there’s a lot of content that we were interested in that we could put on a platform that has infinite real estate as opposed to on linear, where it’s finite real estate or finite inventory.
“Number two, we wanted to make sure that we could handle live at scale. We decided to start smaller with this complementary service, make sure we had the tech right. It’s all going according to plan. We have right around 25 million subscribers, maybe a little bit under that.
“When we launch Flagship, what we’re internally calling Flagship direct-to-consumer, we haven’t established a price point yet, but that will be somewhere in-between the current price of ESPN+, which is $11.99, and the price that you would pay to subscribe to Comcast or Charter or Direct TV. The idea here is that ESPN, if you walk the halls of Bristol, we’re here today in Bristol, you’ll see on our walls, we serve the sports fan anytime, anywhere. That’s our mission statement. We want to be available everywhere, across platforms, and across price points.
“We see an opportunity to serve the sports fan that is not interested in engaging through the big cable or satellite bundle but also feels like ESPN+ is not enough. In other words, they want all the ESPN.”
[ The Varsity with John Ourand ]
The post ESPN’s Jimmy Pitaro on Venu Sports: ‘We believe that this is a pro-competitive service’ appeared first on Awful Announcing .
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