The people behind Venu — a joint venture between Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discover — think a bunch of you will pay $43 a month.
That’s the initial pricing for the bundle that’s set to launch this fall, likely within weeks. It will include all-sports channels like ESPN and FS1, as well as traditional channels whose programming includes sports, like ABC, Fox and TNT.
It’s also not a surprise: When the service was first announced in February, the all-but-official indications were that it would likely be priced in the $40-to-$50 a month range. Which made sense given the underlying economics.
Whether that pricing makes sense to consumers is a different question. That’s because although the service will have a lot of sports, it won’t have all the sports.
Most crucially, it won’t include lots of NFL games, since the package doesn’t include CBS, which has the national rights to AFC games on Sundays. It’s also missing NBC, which has the rights to the league’s Sunday night game.
And the reason those absences matter is because when it comes to sports on TV, there’s the NFL, and then everything else: Not only are the league’s games the most popular sports programming, they are the most popular programming on TV, period. Take the NFL out of traditional TV and there’s almost nothing left at this point.
If you wanted a streaming service that had all of the NFL games on traditional TV, you’d need a service like YouTube TV, which currently costs $73 a month.
Are there sports fans out there who don’t want to pay $73 a month to stream (just about) everything on TV, but will pay $43 a month for lots of what’s on TV?
I can imagine that some of those people exist — particularly if they’re more into sports like the NBA, which Venu will completely own (for at least a year — then things are up in the air since WBD is supposed to lose its NBA rights after that). But it’s hard for me to imagine there are many millions of them.
The official line from the streamers is that this product is targeted at the increasing number of people who don’t pay for a TV package at all — either because they’ve cut the cord or because they never signed up for one.
That’s partly because the TV companies that are part of the bundle kind of believe that, and partly because they have a delicate relationship with pay TV distributors like Comcast.
But privately, the programmers will tell you they’re also not unhappy if someone who is paying for a traditional TV subscription drops that deal and goes to Venu instead. They get paid either way.
One other note: Be mindful when you do see sign-up numbers after the service launches this fall that in streaming, sign-ups don’t mean long-term customers. Every streamer that isn’t Netflix is dealing with brutal churn — customers will sign up for the service, then dip out once they’ve watched whatever they’re interested in.
And that could definitely be a problem for Venu, which is likely to attract people who are most interested in a single sport. And when that sport finishes up, they may very well unsubscribe. That’s what appears to have happened to YouTube TV earlier this year when it reportedly lost customers for the first time ever: The working theory is that NFL fans signed up for the service in the fall and then dropped it after the Super Bowl in February.
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