The prospective joint-venture sports streaming service from global media giants Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Disney, is targeting five million customers within its first five years of operation.
Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of Fox Corp, stated the target figure while speaking at a conference in the US, adding that as many as 60 million US households could make up the new venture’s target market.
The service, which is expected to be priced between the $40 and $50 per month range, will be jointly owned by the three media companies with equal representation on its board of directors.
Murdoch added: "We're running really hard and really fast to get the service up and running before the start of the college [American] football season this year.”
The service, announced in February, is slated to arrive in the latter half of 2024, with the first games of the college football season due to start on August 24.
Besides college football, the service will combine the three companies’ slate of rights in all of the US’ top-tier sports properties, including American football’s NFL, baseball’s MLB, basketball’s NBA and WNBA, ice hockey’s NHL, soccer’s MLS, and motor racing's Nascar, and global sports events such as golf’s PGA tour and mixed martial arts promotion UFC.
The prospective new offering has courted controversy in the sports industry, with rival sports streaming service FuboTV launching an antitrust lawsuit against the three companies in February alleging that the as-yet-unnamed merged streaming service “steals Fubo’s playbook.”
Filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Fubo’s suit said it is seeking to block the joint venture or ensure restrictions on the defendants in launching the streaming service, such as “economic parity of licensing terms.”
Fubo said is also seeking “substantial” monetary damages, adding that the three media giants “engaged in a years-long campaign to block Fubo’s sports-first streaming business resulting in significant harm to both Fubo and consumers.”
