FOX is keeping things relatively modest when it comes to projections for its new joint venture sports streaming service with Disney and Warner Bros Discovery. The company’s CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, said on Monday at the 2024 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference that he believes the service will land five million customers in the first five years. And also believes that the total addressable market is only 60 million customers.
While five million doesn’t sound super ambitious, that would put the streamer as the second-largest vMVPD on the market, behind YouTube TV. Google recently announced that it has 8 million subscribers, while Hulu + Live TV is currently second at 4.6 million subscribers.
Keep in mind that Disney is included in this sports venture, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see it bundled with Hulu in some aspect, which could help boost the numbers of the joint venture.
A total addressable market of 60 million is nothing to sneeze at either, as that is roughly half of the television households in this country. Murdoch also stated that “we know that sports is the number one driver of viewership and subscriptions.” That’s mainly because sports are best enjoyed live versus on-demand, like a lot of other shows.
This new streamer could be a massive competitor to the likes of YouTube TV
YouTube TV is currently the largest streaming live-TV service in the industry right now, but that’s only eight million subscribers. And a big reason why the majority of users are subscribed is for sports. This new streamer could be a big competitor to YouTube TV, since it’s really the only thing keeping a lot of people with a live TV subscription.
However, this service would still be missing two things at this point. That’s local sports and NBC Sports. NBC Sports is going to be a big deal since this is an Olympic year – though the Olympics will be over before this launches. The flip side is that NBC Sports is mostly all available on Peacock, which would be far cheaper than keeping YouTube TV. The bigger issue here is local sports.
In the past year or so, we’ve seen a lot of trouble for local sports from the likes of Sinclair with Bally Sports, who did declare bankruptcy and has decided to drop some coverage of teams already.
The big question for this sports streaming service still remains – price. Streaming sports is not cheap. Sports, in general, is not cheap. If we look at Bally Sports Plus, it was priced at $20 per month, and that only gets you the local teams. This service would include about 14 national channels, including FS1, FS2, Big Ten Network, ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, and many more. So it would not be surprising to see this jump to a much higher price.
If there’s one streaming service that customers will cancel and re-up during certain times of the year, this would be it. For example, I’m a big basketball and football fan. From June to August, I wouldn’t need this service, since the sports I watch are in the off-season. That’s something else that FOX, WBD and Disney will need to combat.
2024-03-05 15:04:47