Venu came. It saw. It didn’t win.

Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. said Friday that their upcoming sports streaming service — announced to much fanfare last year before being rocked by legal challenges — will be canceled.

The service had been given a name (Venu Sports), a management team (led by former Apple executive Pete Distad), and a planned launch date (August 23, 2024), but that date passed and little else was said publicly by the companies until to the news that the joint venture ended.

“In an ever-changing market, we have determined that the best way to meet the evolving needs of sports fans is to focus on existing products and distribution channels,” the companies said in a statement.

Venu Sports was a strange offering that seemed to bridge the old cable bundle and the new world of a la carte streaming services. By combining the three companies’ sports content with some non-sports programming, it was made for fans who liked sports so much that they would pay $42.99 a month for a bundled streaming service, but not $80 for it per month or more wanted to pay for the complete cable package, which would include channels such as NBC, CBS and USA, which also show many sports broadcasts.

There was never any opportunity to determine whether the audience was large enough for such an offer.

Just two weeks after the joint venture was announced, the companies were sued by Fubo, a niche streaming service focused on distributing live sports, accusing the companies of anti-competitive behavior. When Fubo wanted to distribute the companies’ sports channels, it had to pay and also distribute the companies’ non-sports channels like Nat Geo Wild and Cartoon Network, but they allowed Venu to distribute only their sports channels.

A federal judge agreed that this was anti-competitive behavior. In August, a week before Venu was scheduled to go live, Judge Margaret Garnett of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted Fubo a preliminary injunction.

In her ruling, she wrote that Fubo would likely have succeeded in a lawsuit that would have shown that Venu “will materially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in violation of the antitrust laws of this country.”

However, as recently as this week, it looked like Venu was headed for a delayed start.

On Monday, Disney announced that it will combine its Hulu live TV business with Fubo, creating a company that will have 6.2 million live TV subscribers. This would make it the sixth largest pay-TV provider in the country. Disney will own 70 percent of the new company.

Fubo and the joint venture partners asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, which was granted on Wednesday. But a day later, satellite television providers DirecTV and EchoStar wrote letters to the judge pleading with her to preserve her findings in the case.

“Through this settlement, defendants are cashing out and seeking to subdue the very competitor that brought these antitrust violations to trial,” DirecTV wrote in its letter, in which it also said it was “examining its options with respect to the joint venture “check. a thinly veiled suggestion that she, too, might sue.

A day later, Venu Sports was dead.

But there will continue to be new ways to stream sports. Disney-owned ESPN will unveil its flagship streaming service this year. For the first time, fans can receive ESPN channels without having to purchase the cable package.