Fubo CEO David Gandler on Friday slammed Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery, telling Wall Street analysts that the broadcast giants are acting as a "sports cartel" and engaging in "borderline racketeering" with plans for a streaming sports bundle service.
"This is a duel to the death," Gandler told an analyst who asked if the legal battle, filed last month after the joint venture was announced, is a fight "to the death" or if Fubo will relent, considering the legal costs and pressure the lawsuit will bring, Deadline reported.
"We're fighting for consumers," Gandler said. "We're fighting for our customers. We're fighting for the tens of billions of dollars that are wasted annually on consumers paying for the same content multiple times. This is a very important process. We are sticking to our principles, to our guns. We are continuing to walk and chew gum at the same time, as you see in our numbers."
The comments came while Gandler was discussing Fubo's fourth-quarter results with the analysts. The company had strong numbers during the quarter, climbing in subscribers by 12% to 1.62 million, and gaining revenue of 29%, to $402 million.
Fubo is not yet profitable but has narrowed its losses from $96 million last year to $71 million, and its executives have said the company will be cash flow positive by 2025.
However, taking on the other networks over the joint venture could hinder those plans, and Gandler told the analysts that Fubo could have turned a profit in 2023 if "anti-competitive" practices by distributors had not forced the service to pay higher rates for other programming so it could gain access to sports.
But the networks' bundling plans are "just the latest example of the sports cartel's attempt to block and steal Fubo's vision of what a sports streaming bundle should look like, resulting in billions of dollars of damages to our business," he said.
Gandler added that Fubo has an "overwhelming amount of evidence" showing anti-competitive patterns it has dealt with in the past nine years.
"We just want parity," he said.
Gandler added that "things will remain status quo" if the courts do not take up Fubo's lawsuit against the networks' streaming bundle plan or if antitrust regulators don't take action.
"As you've seen from 11 out of 12 quarters, we're continuing to fight the good fight," he told the analysts.
The three media companies involved in the joint venture feature a wide profile of college and professional sports rights, including the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, and the FIFA World Cup.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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