Media Giants’ Sports Venture Could Trigger Earthquake in Cable and Streaming

Whoa! We got very big news in the television world late Tuesday, as Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox announced they were joining forces to create a new streaming joint venture for sports. By including access to programming on traditional cable channels such as Disney’s ESPN, Fox’s sports channels and Warner’s TNT and TBS, the new service will offer pretty much every major sport—including the NFL, NBA, MLB, hockey, college sports and a raft of others. It will also include ESPN+, Disney’s existing sports-streaming service, which streams lots of niche athletics.

Depending on the price the service charges viewers—and it’s likely to be stiff, given the high cost of the sports programming involved—the launch of this service promises to send seismic shocks through the cable TV sector and existing streaming sector. As people still subscribing to cable are holding on mostly because of sports, you can imagine this could cut the knees out from under cable. That makes this venture potentially disastrous for NBCUniversal and Paramount Global, both of which depend on cable for much of their revenue but compete in streaming through Peacock and Paramount+, respectively. Both of those services carry some NFL games, among other sports. Competing for sports fans’ dollars will get much, much harder.