Variety: Fox, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Bundle Projected to Hit 5 Million Subscribers in Five Years, Lachlan Murdoch Says

Story from Variety:

The Fox Corp., Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery sports streaming joint venture is anticipating signing up 5 million customers in the first five years, CEO Lachlan Murdoch said Monday.

The 5 million mark will be where the JV “settles after five years,” Murdoch said, speaking Monday at the 2024 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco. He was making the point that Fox Corp. expects the sports streaming venture will be incremental to its existing pay-TV revenue base.

“This a pro-consumer package,” Murdoch said. Historically, the TV industry has “made life for our audiences… incredibly hard,” he continued. “What this bundle does is put a majority of sports into one bundle. It’s an easy place for sports fans to come to.”

Last month, the media company announced a joint venture with Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery to create a unified streaming platform pooling ESPN+ and their linear TV networks that carry sports programming. The as-yet unnamed joint venture is aiming to launch in the fall of 2024. The trio’s JV plans to sell the sports package directly to consumers in the U.S. and as an add-on to services like Disney+, Hulu and Max.

Murdoch didn’t speak to what the sports-focused bundle will cost, which will be key factor in how widely it’s adopted. Analysts have estimated that it will be priced somewhere between $35-$50 per month.

Murdoch reiterated that the new sports joint venture could have an addressable market of as many as 60 million U.S. households, an audience of “cord-nevers” who have shunned traditional cable and satellite TV. “That’s a huge market,” he said Monday. “That’s half of the television households in this country. And we know that sports is the No. 1 driver… [of] viewership and subscriptions.”

Opponents of the companies’ sports-streaming JV include internet pay-TV provider Fubo, which filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block its launch alleging the venture violates antitrust laws. In addition, the Justice Department plans to review the Disney-Fox-Warner Bros. Discovery venture over potential consumer harms, per a Bloomberg report.

But Murdoch said he’s not “overly concerned” about regulatory hurdles for the sports streaming JV. “We have obviously done a lot of work on this,” he said, saying that the JV will function as a “vMVPD” — industry jargon for “virtual multichannel video programming distributor” — akin to YouTube TV, Fubo or Hulu + Live TV.

Meanwhile, Murdoch said that Fox Nation, the streaming-subscription offshoot of Fox News that starts at $5.99 per month, has about 2 million customers.

For the quarter ended Dec. 31, Fox Corp. revenue declined 8.2% to $4.23 billion — pinched by a 20% drop in advertising sales — while net income sank 65% to $109 million. The company owns Fox News, the Fox broadcast network and Fox Sports.