The Streaming Wars' next battle: The Battle of the Skinny Bundle

The next battle in The Streaming Wars appears to be The Battle of the Skinny Bundle. Here are three major chapters in this saga, as I see things.

Author

Rameez Tase
April 29, 2025

CHAPTER 1: VMVPD

vMVPDs were promised as the antidote to the bloated cable bundle: no ESPN Ocho, lower price, and more relevant advertising from tech-forward companies. YouTube TV + Hulu + Live TV launched in 2017, and the once niche vMVPD category quickly took off. Cumulative Subscribers climbed from <1M in 2017 to >15M at present. For a time, VMVPDs successfully managed to stave off the decline of pay TV that many projected would happen more rapidly than has. In fact, in 2018, there was a period when it appeared that pay TV declines had stabilized. But then, there was COVID. And, so the Streaming Wars kicked off, in earnest.

For VMVPDs, what started as "skinny" quickly ballooned just like the cable bundle. Hulu + Live TV's price point climbed from $40 / mo in 2017 to $83 / mo (>10% CAGR). At one point, Hulu’s CEO even remarked that it was expected behavior for users to sign-up for the NFL, cancel, and return later (so, why not charge folks more?).

CHAPTER 2: VENU

Disney (ESPN) + Fox (Fox Sports) + WBD (TNT Sports) teamed up to launch Venu Sports in 2024. The idea was to give consumers up to 70% of US sports rights at $43 / mo. A return to the original value prop of the vMVPDs! Of course, this never came to fruition, as FuboTV (a leading incumbent vMVPD) successfully blocked Venu's launch via lawsuit and, themselves, ended up being acquired by Disney.

The strategy made sense. There was a huge market for this. A quick market sizing reveals:

  • Over 20M cumulative vMVPD Subscribers (current or past Subscribers)

  • Peacock and Paramount+ each receiving 1M+ Sign-ups in a given weekend for playoff football

  • League-specific services generating almost 10M monthly Sign-ups, in aggregate

But, ultimately, the world is path dependent, and legacy rights deals torpedoed Venu Sports before it launched. Path dependence in the world of Entertainment is the primary driving force, as it were.

As observers to the Venu saga, DirecTV launched its own version, a $70 / mo. sports skinny bundle named “MySports”. While uptake has been non-material to date (7,300 Sign-ups in March, or ~0.5% of eligible customers), we’ll wait to see whether any of the major sporting events (March Madness, NFL season start) change things. In any event, the package is currently only available to DirecTV Stream’s ~1M Subscribers, so the ceiling is low relative to the addressable market.

Includes MySports, MyEntertainment, MyNews, and MiEspañol

And, as far as Venu’s parents go,

  • Disney’s flagship ESPN app is slated to launch this year, and will include full access into its ESPN family of channels

  • As is Fox’s recently announced SVOD service, which will include its Fox Sports channels

  • WBD is doubling down on sports, as well, though their strategy is not as transparent. The company previously considered, and declined to pursue, the idea of a sports-only add-on to its SVOD service

CHAPTER 3: SPORTS RIGHTS AGGREGATION

And, thus, a decade later, the sports & entertainment industry has still not solved the consumer value proposition: we want the sports we want, in one place, at a reasonable price. Between league incentives to create competitive bidding processes, legacy rights deals barring sports from being housed in certain places, and poor interfaces which further fragment rights, we just haven’t been able to figure it out. PS: I was thinking about screenshotting my college friends’ text messages on every Notre Dame game day, expressing their emotions about some of the games being on Peacock, others being on ESPN, and yet others nowhere to be found… but I decided to keep this post PG :).

How do consumers want their rights aggregated?

By sport:

The short-term incentives of each league have been to ensure a large number of healthy media companies who can bid top dollar for their rights. The result has been a seemingly random fragmentation of each sport’s streaming rights across platforms.

By local market:

RSNs: As the classic RSN model falls, several RSNs have launched streaming versions to cater to cord cutters. However, uptake has been slow. For example, NESN 360 (Red Sox, Bruins, Patriots, Celtics) has generated 10s of thousands of monthly Sign-ups vs. the 4M+ households it has access to via the cable bundle. And FanDuel Sports Network (fka Sinclair / Diamond Sports), with backing from Amazon, ~50K monthly Sign-ups.

Team-specific services: With the Utah Jazz and Phoenix Suns leading the way in 2023, quickly followed by the Dallas Stars in 2024, teams have circumvented the model launching their own free and/or paid services for fans. While these services do serve a given team in-market, they do not serve that local market with all major sports teams in the area.

League-specific services: Meanwhile, while NFL+, does offer all local NFL games, due to existing rights deals, the service is currently mobile & tablet-only.

By must-watch:

As major national rights are aggregated by YouTube, Amazon, Disney, Fox, WBD, and others, 2H’25 will kick off chapter 4 in this saga: the battle to be the home for the supermajority of must-watch (by all) sporting events.

Postscript (or, as the Acquired guys call it, “Carveouts”)

Over the past quarter, I’ve been on a thematic bender of sorts… it seems there’s something in the water here in DC that’s causing us to reexamine the validity of the institutions that got us here, and what needs to change (or not) for the next century. All incredible reads, highly recommend.