The new sports streaming venture from Fox, Disney’s ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery is a major-league play for sports fans who are cord-cutters and cord-nevers, meaning they no longer subscribe to a traditional pay-TV bundle or never did.
“There is no product serving the sports fans that are not within the cable TV bundle,” Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said during his company’s earnings call Wednesday.
According to Disney CEO Bob Iger, the skinnier sports bundle that combines popular live sports from each of the media giants such as ESPN’s Monday Night Football, Fox’s Sunday NFL games and the March Madness college basketball tournament on Warner Bros. will be a cheaper alternative to the “big fat” traditional cable package.
He did not say how much the service will cost, only that it would be “substantially less expensive to consumers than the big bundle they have to buy to get those same channels on cable and satellite.”
The typical cable bundle runs upwards of $100 a month.
The announcement of the new joint venture comes as consumers ditch traditional pay-TV at an accelerated pace. The rapid decline in cable TV subscriptions is forcing media giants to follow their customers into the streaming world. There, they can compete for sports fans who have turned to popular internet alternatives such as YouTube TV and FuboTV.
“The opportunity is huge,” Murdoch told analysts Wednesday.
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