After filing an antitrust lawsuit a week earlier against The Walt Disney Co., Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery over their new sports streaming joint venture, Fubo CEO David Gandler on Friday used his company's Q4 earnings call to declare the JV is “borderline racketeering” conducted by a “sports cartel.”
You can access Fubo’s 43-minute earnings call here.
“We assert that this JV is an attempt to monopolize the sports streaming industry and minimize competition,” Gandler told equity analysts. He described the so-called Spulu service as an attempt ‘to block and steal what a sports streaming business should look like.”
Among Gandler’s accusations:
- Disney, Fox and WBD have “levied contract rates” on Fubo “that are 30%-50% higher” than what they charge the company‘s pay TV competition.
- The defendants have “forced“ Fubo “to license unwanted non-sports content to access their must-have sports programming.”
- The defendants have also allegedly “imposed above-market penetration rates for this content.”
- Gandler said the defendants have restricted Fubo’s ability to integrate product features that its competitors have been allowed to deploy.
- And he accused the defendants of forcing Fubo to “license content they don't even own, which further bloats our bundle and raises prices for consumers.”
The CEO added: “We have been dealing with widespread and rampant misconduct from this group and the industry at large. It has to stop.”
Disney, Fox and WBD announced last month they would launch a new joint venture that would bundle the constituents’ linear sports channels, including ESPN, and live-stream them, virtual MVPD-style.
Pundits and press have taken to calling the still-unnamed venture “Spulu,” a play on “sports” and “Hulu,” the latter being the last conglomerate-led streaming JV.
A price hasn't been announced, either, but the general consensus is that it will come in at less than $50 — which rather dramatically undercuts Fubo's $80 monthly price for its 185-channel baseline offering.
Fubo stock is down about 33 cents Friday to $2 a share.
The vMVPD halved its Q4 losses to $70.1 million while announcing the addition of 173,000 customers during the October-December period.
