Actor Jon Hamm plays Don Draper on Mad Men.
Michael Yarish | AMC | AP
Call Don Draper. Venu Sports may have a marketing problem
of Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery The co-owned streaming service announced Thursday that it will launch this fall for $42.99 a month. NetflixThat’s cheaper than major subscription streaming services like , Max and Peacock. It’s also much cheaper than YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, or a standard cable bundle, but those services include a wide range of entertainment content beyond sports.
Venu will offer consumers a one-stop service for networks including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, ABC, Fox, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, TBS and truTV. Subscribers will also have access to ESPN+. The plan launches in time for football season and does not include CBS and NBC, the two networks that hold the rights to many sports, including college football and NFL games.
Venu’s theoretical audience is someone willing to pay a high monthly fee for a limited segment of media (live sports, but not all live sports), and the service is pitched as a product for so-called “cord-nevers,” a younger demographic of consumers who don’t want to pay for cable because they think it’s too expensive, but are eager to watch ESPN and other live sports.
It’s not at all clear that this user base will materialize.
Venu faces two big obstacles to success. First, its target market of users who are happy to pay $43 a month for some sports but aren’t comfortable paying for cable TV may not be as large. Many people who don’t subscribe to cable are content just watching highlights on YouTube and listening to their favorite influencers’ commentary. According to a Kantar survey cited by YouTube in its 2024 upfront, 54% of people Rather Watching creators explain major live events is better than actually watching the event.
Meanwhile, young, NFL-obsessed viewers will need to buy Peacock and Paramount+, the streaming services partnered by NBC and CBS, to watch every NFL game. They can also buy a digital antenna to pair with Venu, though antenna adoption among younger viewers may be a bit ambivalent.
Other major sporting events, such as the currently ongoing Olympics, are broadcast by Olympic broadcasters. Comcast NBCUniversal is not included in this service.
Existing Players
The second problem is potentially even bigger: products like Venu already exist and may already be a better value than Venu.
For $60 per month, Echostar Sling TV It offers the popular networks that come with Venu (ESPN, TNT, TBS, Fox, ABC), but also includes NBC, plus a host of others, including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Bravo, USA, HLN, Discovery NFL Network, and more (46 in total vs. 14 with Venu), plus it comes with an introductory offer that allows consumers to get their first month for just $30.
For those who only want to watch ESPN, Sling TV also offers a $40-per-month package that doesn’t include the broadcast networks but does include more than 20 networks, including TBS, TNT and CNN.
Cincyho | Istock | Getty Images
As of the end of March, Sling TV had 1.92 million subscribers, not growing, and lost 135,000 customers in the first quarter, less than the 234,000 subscriber loss it experienced in the same period last year.
As of the end of 2021, Sling TV had 2.5 million customers, down from a peak of 2.7 million in 2019.
The company blamed the decline in revenue last quarter on the existence of other streaming services.
“We continue to experience increasing competition, including from other subscription video-on-demand and live linear OTT service providers, many of which are our content providers, who offer football and other seasonal sports programming on an a la carte basis directly to their subscribers,” EchoStar said. stated in the filing.
All told, Sling TV, a better service than Venu, which costs about $17 more per month, has been losing subscribers for five years and has never topped its peak of 2.7 million.
This presents a considerable marketing challenge for Venu, as it will need to use the power of its brand and technology to convince consumers that it’s worth signing up for.
Or they’ll hope that the $43/month offer lasts long enough to take advantage of the $17 difference. The typical pattern for live network bundling is to start with an introductory offer and then only increase the price. Venu alluded to this in its press release, telling consumers they can lock in the $43/month price for 12 months from the time of sign-up, suggesting a price increase is on the way.
Venu would like to add more sports to its service in the future, but that would likely increase the price, making the value proposition even harder to sell to people who have never had a cordless TV before.
Pricing even lower than Venu, Disney is planning its ESPN Flagship streaming service in the fall of 2025, which will include ESPN at a lower price than Venu.
Disney, Warner Bros, Discovery and Fox will likely claim to be going for maximum coverage here, in the same way that Apple’s iPad mini slots into its existing lineup between its phones and larger tablets.. Maybe there’s an audience for Venu, and if there is, companies would want to offer it. Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch Already predicted The service could have five million subscribers over the next five years.
But even 5 million seems ambitious given Sling TV’s struggles, and it would need to spend a lot of money on marketing to get there.
And the effort may be too costly to achieve its objectives.
Disclosure: CNBC’s parent company, NBCUniversal, owns NBC Sports and NBC Olympics. NBC Olympics holds the U.S. broadcast rights to all Summer and Winter Olympic Games through 2032. NBC Sports broadcasts NFL games.
