Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Are a ‘Cartel’ Engaging in ‘Borderline Racketeering’:
Normally, when ailing companies band together to provide a deal for consumers, it’s viewed as a win-win. The companies sell some much-needed products, while the consumer saves some money.
Back on Feb. 6, Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery (all ailing in one way or another after a rough 2023) jointly announced plans “to build an innovative new platform to house a compelling streaming sports service.”
In simple terms, each conglomerate is bringing its respective suite of live sports offerings to a single platform. And assuming the pricing isn’t a worse-case scenario, this certainly has the potential to be a big win for sports fans.
But, it’s never actually that simple, is it?
FuboTV, a streaming service that primarily focuses on live sports, is vocally assuming a worst-case scenario for this major sports bundle and the company’s CEO, David Gandler, is leading the offensive.
Speaking at a financial conference call, Gandler tore into this prospective joint venture.
“This is a duel to the death,” Gandler said when asked about his company’s lawsuit against the new sports platform, per Deadline. Gandler called the Disney, Fox and WBD joint venture “borderline racketeering.”
The lawsuit complained that Fubo was forced to take bad deals for less desirable live sports offerings due to the major distributors.
Fubo claims that it would’ve turned a profit in 2023 otherwise.
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According to Deadline, Gandler actually began the call by calling the joint venture “just the latest example of the sports cartel’s attempt to block and steal Fubo’s vision of what a sports streaming bundle should look like.”
“It has been when we started this company,” Gandler later continued. “We’re fighting for consumers. We’re fighting for our customers.
“We’re fighting for the tens of billions of dollars that are wasted annually on consumers paying for the same content multiple times. This is a very important process. We are sticking to our principles, to our guns.
“We are continuing to walk and chew gum at the same time, as you see in our numbers.”
Earlier in the call, Deadline quotes Gandler as blasting the joint venture as “just the latest example of the sports cartel’s attempt to block and steal Fubo’s vision of what a sports streaming bundle should look like, resulting in billions of dollars of damages to our business.”
Despite staring down direct competition from some of the wealthiest and largest media conglomerates in the world, Gandler isn’t lacking in confidence when it comes to the future of his company.
“We’ve been competing with these very large companies for nine years now,” Gandler said. “We have an overwhelming amount of evidence from all these years that demonstrates anti-competitive patterns that we’ve been dealing with.”
He later added, “We just want parity.”
Fubo does find itself in a peculiar space in a post-Netflix world.
While traditional media titans like Disney, Fox and WBD are figuring out how to enter the streaming space — perhaps as a matter of survival — newer-age online outlets like Fubo and Sling and YouTubeTV are figuring out how to navigate a suddenly much more crowded space.
If Gandler’s fiery rhetoric is anything to go by, that crowded space is going to be a mighty contentious one.
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