Just a week into 2025, the media industry got its first consequential transaction: The Walt Disney Company is buying 70 percent of Fubo, the video service that had sued to block the media giant’s plan to create Venu, a sports streaming joint venture with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery.
The agreement, which was announced Monday, puts an end to that litigation. Instead, Fubo will merge with Disney’s Hulu + Live TV offering. But the arrangement has raised some big questions.
Who benefits in the Disney-Fubo deal?
After years of questions about Disney’s plans for Hulu — the company now owns all of the streaming service — Robert A. Iger, the Disney chief, is effectively offloading what Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at LightShed Partners, called “the least exciting part” of Hulu.
Investors will be watching to see how long Disney takes to begin selling down its stake in the Fubo-Hulu + Live TV venture.
Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, along with Disney, will pay a combined $220 million to settle litigation with Fubo. (Disney will also extend Fubo a $145 million loan.) They appear to be betting that paying to settle with Fubo will be covered by the benefits they expect to get from Venu.
The agreement appears to validate the decision by Edgar Bronfman Jr., Fubo’s executive chairman, to try to block the launch of Venu.
The size of Mr. Bronfman’s stake in Fubo has not been publicly disclosed, but he is believed to be one of the company’s largest individual shareholders. And it creates a new narrative for him after his aborted bid to buy Paramount last year.
Are Venu’s antitrust problems really over?
Fubo may have settled its fight to stop the streaming venture, but the Justice Department filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case — and there is nothing in the Fubo settlement prohibiting the agency from filing its own lawsuit.
Advocacy groups are pushing the Trump administration to keep a close eye on Venu. “For the past year, Fubo led sports fans and industry observers to believe they were genuinely interested in challenging Disney’s illegal joint venture in sports streaming, only to cash a check and leave consumers and the entire streaming industry worse off,” Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project, which calls for stronger antitrust oversight, said in a statement on Monday.
How will the new Fubo do?
Investors are clearly bullish on the service gaining greater scale to compete. But despite a 251 percent surge in the company’s stock price on Monday, Fubo’s market value stands at a relatively low $1.7 billion — and it is taking on well-heeled rivals in livestreaming, including Google’s YouTube TV and the broadband giants Charter and Comcast.
