Venu Sports

Venu Sports

Type of business	Joint venture
Type of site	OTT video streaming platform
Area served	United States
Owner	ESPN Inc. (33.33%) (Disney: 80%, Hearst: 20%) Fox Corporation (33.33%) Warner Bros. Discovery (33.33%)
Key people	Pete Distad (CEO)
URL	Archived official website at the Wayback Machine (archive index)
Current status	Canceled

Venu Sports, or simply Venu (/ˈvɛnju/), was a proposed sports-focused streaming service in the United States, to be operated as a joint venture between ESPN Inc. (a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Communications), Fox Corporation (through the Fox Sports Media Group), and Warner Bros. Discovery (owner of TNT Sports). Announced on February 6, 2024, it was originally scheduled to launch by the summer or fall of 2024, with each of the three partners owning one-third of the venture, subject to the negotiation of final contracts between them. On January 10, 2025, the companies announced Venu would not launch.

Venu sought to bundle the majority of U.S. national sports broadcast rights controlled by the three companies in a single subscription, with limited entertainment and news content. The service would have been available as a standalone product, or sold as part of a bundle with one of the companies' other streaming platforms like Disney+, Hulu, or Max.

The joint venture partners said Venu would have been specifically targeted to cord-cutters and cord-nevers who were not active subscribers to either a traditional cable or satellite TV package, or an existing mainstream virtual MVPD such as FuboTV, YouTube TV, or Disney's Hulu + Live TV package.

On August 16, 2024, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction to block the venture's launch after FuboTV filed an antitrust lawsuit against the partners. The lawsuit was settled in January 2025 as part of a planned merger of FuboTV with the Hulu + Live TV business, with Disney earning a 70% stake of the combined company. However, DirecTV and Dish Network asked the court to reconsider the case, and later that month Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery decided to discontinue the Venu joint venture.^[1]