ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery will be combining all of their sports content on one streaming platform, according to an exclusive report from the Wall Street Journal.
The service will offer all sports assets from all three companies, according to the Journal.
Those assets include a wide range of rights covering virtually every major sport and league under the sun. NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, you name it. Heck, if you want to watch badminton or snooker it will probably be on here too.
The as-yet-unnamed service will reportedly be available later this year and will be offered as a standalone product and as a bundle with Disney+, Hulu and HBO’s Max, per the Journal.
It’s a truly earth-shattering move for the sports content business that has been getting increasingly more expensive for both the content providers and the customers. (RELATED: Grab Your Pitchforks, NFL Fans: The Ratings Are In For NFL’s Streamed Playoff Game And We’re All Doomed)
Consumers who have been banging their heads against the wall trying to buy Peacock to watch an NFL playoff game or figure out Apple TV+ just to see their favorite sluggers play some Friday night baseball may welcome this move on its face considering it will likely make viewing sports significantly more convenient.
But, as my pops always told me, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Something’s gotta give here, and I think it will be the price. The current cost for a combined package of the basic versions of all the major streamers that carry sports — Apple TV+, Peacock, Max, ESPN+ and Amazon Prime Video — totals somewhere between $55 and $60. If this new service is any cheaper then it might have value, but I’m highly skeptical that will be the case.
In a world in which younger audiences are leaving traditional and linear media in droves for more curated, instantly available and shorter-form content on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, sports are cable advertisers’ last bastion of DVR-free programming. Advertisements on live sports are worth their weight in gold. Any move these massive media conglomerates make will inexorably be tied to their bottom line. I’m not saying to not get excited: a one-stop shop for literally all live sports is an enticing possibility.
I’m just saying stay frosty out there, folks. In the rapidly shifting media landscape, these massive decisions have the potential to shape the future of what our sports entertainment experience looks like. Hopefully, these guys don’t botch this and turn our last sanctuary of escapism into a corpo-fueled nightmare.