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Disney Faced with $1B Lawsuit After Announcing New Streaming Platform

in Disney, Entertainment

Posted on by Luke Dammann
Lawsut filed against Disney, Fox and Warner Bros.

Credit: ITM

A new lawsuit directly targets The Walt Disney Company and could mean trouble for a planned streaming service.

Disney+ logo over Pixar logo with characters
Credit: Disney/Pixar

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The Walt Disney Company is the target of a new lawsuit weeks after it announced its massive new alliance with industry titans Fox Corp and Warner Bros. on an upcoming streaming platform dedicated to sports.

FuboTV is suing all three collaborators over the sports streaming joint venture the three companies revealed earlier in February, stating that the new partnership and service exemplify an “extreme suppression of competition in the U.S. sports-focused streaming market,” according to CNBC.

The new venture seeks to provide viewers with a brand-new way to watch live sports events and is slated to officially launch in the Fall of 2024. Sports is something The Walt Disney Company has had a hand in for years, with the company first purchasing ESPN in 1996. Many mysteries still remain regarding this new service, including its structure and pricing, but the potential it has is unrivaled.

The Fox, Warner Bros, and Disney logos all together in one banner.
Credit: Edited by Inside The Magic

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“These horizontal competitors are colluding to create a JV that will cause substantial harm to competition and consumers,” reads the new complaint. This is far from Disney’s first attempt at branching out into entertainment service, with Hulu merging with Disney+ earlier in 2023. The lawsuit specifically names ESPN and Hulu as defendants, both falling under the massive umbrella that is The Walt Disney Company.
FuboTV Inc. is a streaming television service serving consumers throughout North America and Spain. The platform focuses on distributing live sporting events to users and was founded in 2015.
“Each of these companies has consistently engaged in anti-competitive practices that aim to monopolize the market, stifle any form of competition, create higher pricing for subscribers, and cheat consumers from deserved choice,” FuboTV CEO David Gandler said in a statement. “By joining together to exclusively reserve the rights to distribute a specialized live sports package, we believe these corporations are erecting insurmountable barriers that will effectively block any new competitors from entering the market.”

Fubu is arguing that the new joint venture between Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. signifies an unfair control of the market, which will result in inflated prices for customers. According to the new CNBC report, Craig Moffett, an analyst at MoffettNathanson, stated antitrust challenges were likely.

Stay tuned here for more details as this story develops. 

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