A Tough One for ESPN. Or is it?

Thinking like a mega-corp

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Pretty terrible timing, right? The college football season is just under way, the NFL season is on tap, the U.S. Open tennis championship is steaming toward its headline rounds, and ESPN suddenly disappears from the channel guide of 11 million DirecTV customers.

Yeah. You’d hate to have a bunch of traditional TV subscribers up in arms about the services they aren’t getting right at the moment that you’re hoping to launch a standalone sports super-bundle streamer.

About that, we’ll have to wait and see. A judge last month issued a preliminary injunction pausing the planned launch of Venu, which is supposed to combine the super-powers of Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery into a sports-focused streaming service. There’s more legal wrangling to be done before Venu can proceed - at a jaw-dropping $42.99 a month, by the way.

While that’s on hold, Disney/ESPN can certainly make viewers aware of what they’d be missing if those top-shelf channels went away. DirecTV customers are simply getting a fresh reminder – not that this was planned in any way, you understand.