Pay TV distributors may be planning their attack against new sports joint venture

It’s been about a week since Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox announced a new joint venture to offer live sports outside the traditional cable bundle, and pay TV distributors are still trying to figure out just how disruptive the new service will be.

The key question for distributors such as Comcast, Charter and DirecTV is whether they’ll be allowed to offer the same skinny bundle of linear networks that Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox announced will be available to consumers later this fall. That bundle includes ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Fox, FS1, FS2, and a handful of other cable channels that showcase sports.

If Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox allow distributors to offer the same product, in addition to the standard cable bundle, there’s likely to be minimal consternation about the joint venture. But it’s not clear that will be the case, given that may defeat the purpose of its existence.

In 2023, Charter began offering a package of cable networks that didn’t include sports to lower the cost of cable TV for customers who only wanted news and entertainment. Offering sports to only those people who want to watch sports is good for distributors, but it’s harmful to programmers, who benefit from the millions of households that pay for sports but don’t watch them.

That’s why, logically, the new sports joint venture only makes sense if the three media companies bar distributors from offering the same product.

So far, the largest pay TV distributors haven’t spoken publicly about the forthcoming bundle because they’re still gathering information on the joint venture’s plans, according to people familiar with their thinking, who asked not to be named because the discussions have been private.

Privately, however, leaders at Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox have begun to hear complaints from some distributors, who are concerned the new…