We don't even know what its monthly price will be, but streaming linear sports JV Venu Sports has already been somehow billed by several research companies as potentially being a profoundly disruptive force that could break the back of the U.S. pay TV business once and for all.
Horowitz Research is the latest to render an eye-popping take on the Disney, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery joint venture, which the companies said will launch sometime in the fall and bundle popular linear sports channels including ESPN, Fox Sports 1 and TNT.
Assuming a price point of $35-$40 a month, 42% of 2,008 surveyed U.S. adults who identified themselves as "sports viewers" said they'll "likely" or "very likely" subscribe to Venu Sports, Horowitz said.
Horowitz said 58% of sports viewers age 18-34 and 57% of those 35-49 indicated a likelihood to subscribe to Venu, described in Horowitz's survey as "a new subscription streaming service with ESPN+ content, plus live feeds." Only 23% of sports viewers age 50 and older indicated a likely inclination.
Additionally, the research company said Latino (53%) and Black (50%) viewers over-index as describing themselves as likely Venu subscribers vs. white/non-hispanic (39%) and Asian (40%) TV sports consumers.
Certainly, nearly 60% of "sports viewers" age 18-49 would seem to define a massive potential customer base of tens of millions of users -- a consumer migration that would seem to dramatically escalate the disruption for the already roiled U.S. pay TV ecosystem.
Among those who said they'd likely sign up for Venu, 38% indicated a likelihood that they'll make major changes to their TV subscription portfolio.
