Venu Sports has a tough marketing challenge to find an audience

Call Don Draper, Venu Sports may have a marketing problem

The Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery jointly-owned streaming service said Thursday it will launch this fall at $42.99 per month. That’s much more expensive than Netflix, Max, Peacock or any other major subscription streaming service. It’s a lot less than the $73-per-month YouTube TV or a standard cable bundle — but those offerings include a wide variety of entertainment content beyond sports.

Venu will give consumers access to a bundle of networks: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, ABC, Fox, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, TBS, and truTV. Subscribers will also get ESPN+. The plan is to debut in time for the football season. It doesn’t include CBS and NBC, two networks that have the rights to many sports, including college football and NFL games.

Venu’s theoretical user is someone willing to pay a hefty monthly subscription for a narrow segment of media — live sports, but not all live sports. The service is marketing itself as a product for so-called “cord nevers” — a set of younger consumers who haven’t wanted to pay for cable because it’s too expensive but have been yearning for access to ESPN and other live sports.

It’s entirely unclear this user base will materialize.

There are two major obstacles for Venu to succeed. First, the total addressable market of users who are OK with paying $43 per month for some sports but not OK with paying for cable may not be that high. Many non-cable subscribers are content to watch highlights on YouTube and their favorite influencers for commentary. According to a survey by Kantar, cited by YouTube at its 2024 upfront, 54% of people would rather watch creators break down a major live event than actually watch the event.

On the other end of the spectrum, NFL-crazed younger people will have to buy Peacock and Paramount+ — the streaming services attached to NBC and CBS — to get a full slate of NFL games. They could also get a digital antenna to pair with Venu, but antenna uptake among younger viewers may be a tad oxymoronic.

Other major sporting events — such as the ongoing Olympics — simply won’t be available on Venu, because Olympic broadcaster Comcast’s NBCUniversal isn’t a part of the service.

For $60 per month, Echostar’s Sling TV offers the popular networks that come with Venu — ESPN, TNT, TBS, Fox and ABC — but it also includes NBC. Moreover, it also comes with CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Bravo, USA, HLN, Discovery NFL Network, and a slew of other networks — 46 in all, to Venu’s 14. Plus, it comes with an introductory offer where consumers can pay just $30 for the first month.

As of the end of March, Sling TV had 1.92 million subscribers, and it’s not growing. It lost 135,000 customers in the…