Disney, Fox Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery are teaming up for a sports streaming venture set to launch by the end of the year.
Details are still coming into focus about the service, which will pool resources among three of the biggest owners of sports rights. One aspect yet to be determined is how the new venture will affect linear broadcasts.
NBCUniversal has recently experimented, with notable success, with streaming-only carriage of high-profile games.
The Wall Street Journal had the first report of the joint venture.
The companies had been discussing the notion of a team-up in recent months, Deadline understands. Those talks are in part an acknowledgement of increasing pressure being applied by deep-pocketed tech companies taking a closer look at the sports sector.
Amazon has locked up long-term rights to NFL Thursday Night Football and also streams Major League Baseball and a number of other live sports on Prime Video. Apple has also gotten into business with MLB and formed a venture with Major League Soccer. Netflix has been making moves in the live arena and is tiptioeing toward major sports, the most recent sign being a 10-year, $5 billion deal for the WWE’s sports-adjacent Raw franchise.
The notion of a JV is an interesting development for Disney, given its recent buyout of Comcast’s financial stake in Hulu and also its development of a stand-alone version of ESPN that will be more robust than ESPN+. Sources were not able to say at this stage what the advent of the JV would mean for those efforts.
Of the three partners in the JV, Fox is the least encumbered in terms of feeding streaming services. The company mainly operates free, ad-supported services like Tubi. It did not entered the subscription streaming derby like many media companies did years ago.
MORE to come …
