It’s been quite a week for the so-called “skinny bundle.”
The much-ado-about-nothing Venu Sports venture between Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery went from a supposedly imminent launch to complete dissolution in just two days. And now DirecTV has launched its own service called “MySports” that is intended to accomplish much of the same things that Venu set out to do.
But what even is a skinny bundle? And will any of these present or future services actually be useful to the sports fan?
Just like viewing live sports in the year 2025, the answers to those questions aren’t as straightforward as they seem. Let’s start with the more simplistic question.
What is a skinny bundle?
A skinny bundle is a combination of television channels that includes one set of interests while omitting others. Think of it like this. When someone flips through a traditional channel lineup on a cable package, they will see channels ranging from news to sports to entertainment to children’s programming and beyond. A skinny bundle isolates one of these genres (say, news) and offers customers a package that includes only news channels while excluding sports, entertainment, and everything else.
The idea behind the skinny bundle is to allow customers to pay for what they want to watch and not what they don’t.
In practice, the skinny bundle has not been a realistic venture until recently. Networks have traditionally required pay TV providers like Comcast and DirecTV to carry all of their channels or none at all. That meant a company like Disney wouldn’t allow Comcast, for instance, to carry ESPN if they didn’t also agree to carry smaller channels like National Geographic.
That practice, known as bundling, has been the industry standard practically since the advent of cable. Now, however, with so much of these smaller channels’ content available on streaming platforms, the primary consumers of that content have cut the cord, and those channels largely exist to bloat the cable bills of remaining customers.
For the most part, those remaining customers are viewers of live programming like sports and news. And as pay TV providers continue to hemorrhage subscribers, they’ve longed for the ability to create a more attractive offering, at a lower price point, that includes just sports channels without the other stuff that nobody wants.
They want to sell a skinny bundle.
Will skinny bundles actually be useful for sports fans?
The short answer to this question is, it depends.
Venu Sports, the proposed tie-up between Disney, Fox, and WBD, would’ve offered sports fans some of what they wanted, but not all. Before the three companies decided to ditch the product, Venu was set to launch at a starting price of $42.99 and include ABC, the ESPN family of networks, Fox, FS1, FS2, Big Ten Network, TNT, TBS, and truTV.
Depending on what sports you like, that could’ve been a good deal — especially if supplemented with a Peacock and Paramount+ subscription for programming owned by NBC and CBS. Even with the two additional subscriptions, sports fans would’ve gotten most everything out there for a price well below cable or cable alternatives like YouTube TV.
Key omissions would’ve included any regional sports network (a pretty big deal for many sports fans), and league-owned networks like NFL Network, NBA TV, MLB Network, and NHL Network.
DirecTV’s “MySports” package fills in most of those gaps, including all of the league-owned networks, and NBC’s broadcast network and cable channels. The problem is the price point. After three months at the promotional price of $49.99 per month, the offering jumps to $69.99 per month, just about ten bucks off from YouTube TV’s current price, which gives you everything.
MySports plans to include add-ons for regional sports networks down the line, which would obviously bump up the price a bit more.
At that price point, MySports is a much harder sell than a subscription that falls firmly between the price of streaming services like Netflix and full-on pay TV packages like YouTube TV. It’s difficult to imagine there’s a market for sports fans who would pay $70 per month to get all the sports they like but wouldn’t pay an extra $10 to add news and entertainment channels.
Ultimately, a useful skinny bundle will be one that successfully melds price and content offerings. ESPN’s upcoming “Flagship” streaming service that is set to launch later this year could be a step in the right direction given its reported price point of $25-30. But even then, that only includes what airs on ESPN (unless Fox sublicenses content to them). Fans would need alternative methods to access everything else.
Right now, sports fans are caught in purgatory. Content providers like Disney don’t want to create an offering that would undercut the still very lucrative pay TV bundle but know they will eventually need something that meets consumers where they are. That tension creates the environment sports fans find themselves in today where several different services and subscriptions are required to watch sports.
At some point, there will be a skinny bundle that truly is useful for sports fans. It just doesn’t seem like that is ready yet. In the meantime, products like MySports will attempt to fill that gap.
