Credit: Inside the MagicThe NFL is not impressed with the Walt Disney Company’s plans to team up with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery for a world-dominating sports streaming app, and it is just coming right out and saying it.
Big business makes for stranger bedfellows. Although Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. are all locked in deadly competition for viewing audiences and advertising dollars on various media levels, all three companies also cooperate and even partner up in numerous other ways. You can find Warner Bros. movies and TV like Dune (2021) and The Bachelor on Hulu, which is owned by Disney, and the lines between rival corporations get blurrier all the time.
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Nowhere is that more evident than the recent announcement of Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. teaming up for a new mega-app of sports content, a massively popular field that all three companies have struggled to translate to streaming. This new combined service will combine all three companies’ catalogs of sports entertainment, including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SEC Network, ACC Network, ESPNews, ABC, Fox, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, TBS, truTV, and ESPN+. Additionally, it will include, as of yet, unspecified offerings of collegiate sports, NBA, MLB, NHL, and the NFL.
The anticipation of this new streaming service is being undercut by the NFL itself, the single largest and most-watched sports league in the United States. While Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery are all huge companies with a lot of sway with audiences, their joint foray into sports content will find it hard to latch onto subscribers if it doesn’t have the NFL behind it.
At the recent Washington Post Live Futurist Summit, NFL chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp spoke out against the upcoming Disney-Fox-Warner sports content service, dismissing what appeal it could have to fans. He said, “They’re positioning it as the ultimate sports bundle, but it’s missing more than half of NFL football. I’m a bit confused personally by the value proposition.”
Rolapp has a point: the problem that these companies are promising to solve with their new joint venture is that sports content is currently randomly spread across channels like Fox Sports and ESPN, while the National Football League, National Baseball League, and Major League Baseball all have their streaming rights confusingly dispersed. If this new Tri-Force of sports media doesn’t offer a single service on which they can be watched, what is the point?
The NFL chief continued, saying, “I don’t understand how a sports fan is going to look at that and say that’s a better value than, say, for $20 more a month, I could buy YouTube TV and have all of the NFL and then actually have access to Sunday Ticket, which is our out-of-market package on Sunday afternoons.”
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If the NFL does not back the Disney-Fox-Warner streaming service, it could very well cause a domino effect in which MLB, NHL, and the NBA also begin questioning the necessity of the three companies teaming up.
And that’s not the only problem that Disney-Fox-Warner has with the unnamed service, which is ambitiously scheduled to launch this fall. Other sports providers have already filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against the merged app, claiming that it would form an unfair monopoly on content, and it’s very possible that the U.S. government could get involved with an anti-trust suit.
The three companies don’t have that much time to put their service together, and all that certainly can’t help.
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