While Venu Sports is dead, the key figure at its helm now has a new job.
That would be Pete Distad, named CEO of the ESPN/Fox/Warner Bros. Discovery sports joint streaming venture last March following a decade and a half at Hulu and Apple. Fox announced this week that Distad will now head their upcoming direct-to-consumer project, which is expected to cover sports, Fox News, entertainment, and more:
Life after Venu pic.twitter.com/qSAKFDTRdU
— Joe Flint (@JBFlint) February 27, 2025
While Venu was a joint venture between all stakeholders regarding content and ownership and was set up as a separate entity, the employees it brought in largely came from Fox. Fox was believed to have the most skin in the game with Venu, as they didn’t have their own over-the-top option (which WBD already has with Max and which ESPN parent Disney is developing with Flagship for a fall 2025 release). So it makes a lot of sense that if Fox were pleased with Distad’s work on Venu, they’d bring him over to their new streaming project (which likely also involves many Venu employees who came from Fox in the first place).
As we discussed when Distad was hired for Venu last March, he does have a lot of relevant experience. At Hulu, he was part of the team that launched that subscription video service (which itself was also originally a joint venture between Fox and Comcast; Disney bought Fox’s majority stake in the 2019 Disney-Fox deal, then bought out Comcast beginning in 2023) back in 2007. He served as senior vice president of marketing and distribution there.
Distad went to Apple in August 2013 and spent a decade leading their video/sports/TV+ business, operations, marketing, and distribution teams. That started with marketing for their Apple TV hardware product but took a notable shift towards streaming around the 2019 launch of Apple TV+. So he’s twice been involved in subscription video service launches and was set to be a key part of a third one before the Venu plug was pulled. We’ll see how it goes for him this time.
