Call Don Draper, Venu Sports may have a marketing problem

The Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery jointly-owned streaming service said Thursday it will launch this fall at $42.99 per month. That’s much more expensive than Netflix, Max, Peacock or any other major subscription streaming service. It’s a lot less than the $73-per-month YouTube TV or a standard cable bundle — but those offerings include a wide variety of entertainment content beyond sports.

Venu will give consumers access to a bundle of networks: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, ABC, Fox, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, TBS, and truTV. Subscribers will also get ESPN+. The plan is to debut in time for the football season. It doesn’t include CBS and NBC, two networks that have the rights to many sports, including college football and NFL games.

Venu’s theoretical user is someone willing to pay a hefty monthly subscription for a narrow segment of media — live sports, but not all live sports. The service is marketing itself as a product for so-called “cord nevers” — a set of younger consumers who haven’t wanted to pay for cable because it’s too expensive but have been yearning for access to ESPN and other live sports.

It’s entirely unclear this user base will materialize.

There are two major obstacles for Venu to succeed. First, the total addressable market of users who are OK with paying $43 per month for some sports but not OK with paying for cable may not be that high. Many non-cable subscribers are content to watch highlights on YouTube and their favorite influencers for commentary. According to a survey by Kantar, cited by YouTube at its 2024 upfront, 54% of people would rather watch creators break down a major live event than actually watch the event.

On the other end of the spectrum, NFL-crazed younger people will have to buy Peacock and Paramount+ — the streaming services attached to NBC and CBS — to get a full slate of NFL games. They could also get a digital antenna to pair with Venu, but antenna uptake among younger viewers may be a tad oxymoronic.

Other major sporting events — such as the ongoing Olympics — simply won’t be available on Venu, because Olympic broadcaster Comcast’s NBCUniversal isn’t a part of the service.

For $60 per month, Echostar’s Sling TV offers the popular networks that come with Venu — ESPN, TNT, TBS, Fox and ABC — but it also includes NBC. Moreover, it also comes with CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Bravo, USA, HLN, Discovery NFL Network, and a slew of other networks — 46 in all, to Venu’s 14. Plus, it comes with an introductory offer where consumers can pay just $30 for the first month.

As of the end of March, Sling TV had 1.92 million subscribers, and it’s not growing. It lost 135,000 customers in the first quarter, which was actually a narrower loss than the 234,000 subscribers it lost in the first quarter a year ago.

At the end of 2021, Sling TV had 2.5 million customers, down from the 2.7 million subscribers it topped out at in 2019.

The company blamed the existence of other streaming services for its decline last quarter.

“We continue to experience increased competition, including competition from other subscription video-on-demand and live-linear OTT service providers, many of which are providers of our content and offer football and other seasonal sports programming direct to subscribers on an a la carte basis,” Echostar said in a filing.

To sum up, Sling TV — a more robust offering than Venu for about $17 more per month — has been losing subscribers for five years and never got more than 2.7 million as its peak.

That’s quite the marketing challenge for Venu, which will need to convince consumers that it’s worth signing up for on the strength of branding and technology.

Or, it will hope that its $43 per month offer lasts long enough that it can take advantage of the $17 delta. The typical pattern for bundles of live networks is they start with an introductory offer only to raise prices. Venu hinted at this in its press release, telling consumers they could lock in the $43 per-month price for 12 months from time of sign-up — suggesting a price increase may be coming.

Venu wants to add more sports to the service in time, but that will likely cause the price to increase, making the value proposition an even tougher sell for cord-nevers.

Further undercutting Venu, Disney is already planning an ESPN Flagship streaming service in the fall of 2025, which will include ESPN for a lower price than Venu.

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox will argue that they’re going for maximum coverage here — kind of like the Apple iPad mini did in slotting into the tech company’s existing product line-up between its phones and larger tablets. Maybe there’s an audience for Venu, and if there is, the companies want to serve it. Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch has already predicted the service can get 5 million subscribers in the next five years.

But even 5 million seems ambitious given Sling TV’s struggles. Getting there will require a lot of money spent on marketing.

And that effort may be so costly that it defeats the purpose.

Disclosure: CNBC parent NBCUniversal owns NBC Sports and NBC Olympics. NBC Olympics is the U.S. broadcast rights holder to all Summer and Winter Games through 2032. NBC Sports broadcasts NFL games.