Venu Sports finally announces price of $43 a month, for starters

By Phil Nickinson Published August 1, 2024

The sports-centric streaming service that combines the events of Disney (which means ESPN), Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery finally has a price. Venu Sports today announced that it’ll cost $43 a month when the service goes live this fall. It still has not set a date for launch, but suffice to say that it’ll come before the college football season kicks off.

Subscriptions will run month-to-month, and include a free seven-day trial. And Venu says that anyone who signs up at the launch price will have that price for 12 months. That’s a slightly ominous statement that could well point toward a price increase after the first year. But the good news is that’s you’re not locked into a contract and can cancel whenever you want

While it won’t include every single sports event you might otherwise find on a traditional cable or streaming linear service — Paramount (which means CBS) and Comcast (NBC) are notably absent — Venu Sports will still have a pretty deep bench. So expect the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBA, NHL, WNBA, college football and basketball, international soccer, tennis, golf, and auto racing — just for starters.

Linear sports networks will include the ESPN family of channels — including ESPN+ — SEC and ACC Network (both of which are run by ESPN), ABC, Fox, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, and TBS. And there will be a robust library of on-demand content, too.

Execs of the three companies involved have all said that Venu Sports isn’t meant to leech subscribers from their traditional cable and streaming services, but instead they’re going after some 60 million “cord-nevers” — those who don’t currently subscribe to anything. That’s drawn a lawsuit from Fubo, which is the smallest of the four major live-streaming services in the U.S.

We’ve written before that the streaming era is really about choice, insofar as an end user is concerned. And it looks like Venu Sports may well provide a tempting choice, indeed.