Although Fubo’s lawsuit against the JV appears to be settled, other rivals in sports television seemed intent on continuing to fight Venu.
In a January 9 letter (PDF) to US District Judge Margaret M. Garnett of the Southern District in New York, who granted Fubo’s premliminary injunction against Venu, Michael Hartman, general counsel and chief external affairs officer for DirectTV, wrote that Fubo’s settlement “does nothing to resolve the underlying antitrust violations at issue.” Hartman asked the court to maintain the preliminary injunction against the app’s launch.
“The preliminary injunction has protected consumers and distributors alike from the JV Defendant’s scheme to ‘capture demand,’ ‘suppress’ potentially competitive sports bundles, and impose consumer price hikes,” the letter says, adding that DirectTV would continue to explore its options regarding the JV “and other anticompetitive harms.”
Similarly, Pantelis Michalopoulos, counsel for EchoStar Corporation, which owns Dish, penned a letter (PDF) to Garnett on January 7, claiming the members of the JV “purchased their way out of their antitrust violation.” Michalopoulos added that the JV defendants “should not be able to pay their way into erasing the Court’s carefully reasoned decision” to temporarily block Venu’s launch.
In addition to Fubo, DirecTV, and Dish, ACA Connects (a trade association for small- to medium-sized telecommunication service providers) publicly expressed concerns about Venu. NFL was also reported to be worried about the implications of the venture.
Now, the three giants behind Venu are throwing in the towel and abandoning an app that could have garnered a lot of subscribers tired of hopping around apps, channels, and subscriptions to watch all the sports content they wanted. But they’re also avoiding a lot of litigation and potential backlash in the process.
Fubo’s merger with Disney represents a shocking about-face for the sports-streaming provider, which previously had raised alarms (citing Citi research) about Disney’s ownership of 54 percent of the US sports rights market—ESPN (26.8 percent), Fox (17.3 percent), and WBD (9.9 percent). Fubo successfully got a preliminary injunction against Venu in August, and a trial was scheduled for October 2025.
Fubo CEO David Gandler said in February that Disney, Fox, and WBD “are erecting insurmountable barriers that will effectively block any new competitors.
“Each of these companies has consistently engaged in anticompetitive practices that aim to monopolize the market, stifle any form of competition, create higher pricing for subscribers, and cheat consumers from deserved choice,” Gandler also said at the time.
Now, set to be a Disney company, Fubo is singing a new tune, with its announcement claiming that the merger “will enhance consumer choice by making available a broad set of programming offerings.”
In a statement today, Gandler added that the merger will allow Fubo to “provide consumers with greater choice and flexibility” and “to scale effectively,” while adding that the deal “strengthens Fubo’s balance sheet” and sets Fubo up for “positive cash flow.”
Ars Technica reached out to Fubo about its previously publicized antitrust and anticompetitive concerns, whether or not those concerns had been addressed, and new concerns that it has settled its lawsuit in favor of its own business needs rather than over a resolution of customer choice problems. Jennifer Press, Fubo SVP of communications, responded to our questions with a statement, saying in part:
We filed an antitrust suit against the Venu Sports partners last year because that product was intended to be exclusive. As its partners announced last year, consumers would only have access to the Venu content package from Venu, which would limit choice and competitive pricing.
The definitive agreement that Fubo signed with Disney today will actually bring more choice to the market. As part of the deal, Fubo extended carriage agreements with Disney and also Fox, enabling Fubo to create a new Sports and Broadcast service and other genre-based content packages. Additionally, as the antitrust litigation has been settled, the Venu Sports partners can choose to launch that product if they wish. The launch of these bundles will enhance consumer choice by making available a broad set of programming offerings.
“… a total deception”
Some remain skeptical about Disney buying out a company that was suing it over antitrust concerns.
FIFA’s announcement suggested that it expects to reach a larger audience and increase US engagement by airing on Netflix. FIFA said that 1.2 billion people watched the 2019 Women’s World Cup, ESPN noted. Netflix has already demonstrated the ability to lure a massive amount of viewers to exclusive sports matches. In November, Netflix claimed the “most-streamed sporting event ever” when it streamed a boxing event centered on a Mike Tyson and Jake Paul fight and reportedly garnered 65 million live concurrent streams.
Per FIFA’s announcement, Netflix will stream the tournaments in English and Spanish via a “dual telecast.” Under the deal, Netflix will also release a documentary series about the biggest players ahead of both tournaments. Brazil will host the 2027 event, while the host country for the 2031 Women’s World Cup has yet to be announced.
The news comes as streaming platforms continue battling over sports. Currently, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox are in a legal battle over plans to launch a joint sports streaming app, Venu, which is being challenged by sports streamer Fubo over antitrust allegations. The case is set to go to trial in October.
Meanwhile, fans are adjusting to changes in how sports events are aired, learning to bounce between channels and streaming services to find their events and dealing with buffering and other technical problems. At times, some of the biggest fans, like NFL player Tariq Woolen, have resorted to illegal pirating to avoid complications and fees, underscoring pressure for streaming services to perfect and simplify the streaming of the live events that they’re eagerly snatching up.
AI, while having potential, “must be handled responsibly and with a firm focus on user control,” and third-party developers may not take “such a deliberate approach,” Strava wrote. And the firm expects the API changes will “affect only a small fraction (less than 0.1 percent) of the applications on the Strava platform” and that “the overwhelming majority of existing use cases are still allowed,” including coaching platforms “focused on providing feedback to users.”
Ars has contacted Strava and will update this post if we receive a response.
DC Rainmaker’s post about Strava’s changes points out that while the simplest workaround for apps would be to take fitness data directly from users, that’s not how fitness devices work. Other than “a Garmin or other big-name device with a proper and well-documented” API, most devices default to Strava as a way to get training data to other apps, wrote Ray Maker, the blogger behind the DC Rainmaker alias.
Beyond day-to-day fitness data, Strava’s API agreement now states more precisely that an app cannot process a user’s Strava data “in an aggregated or de-identified manner” for the purposes of “analytics, analyses, customer insights generation,” or similar uses. Maker writes that the training apps he contacted had been “completely broadsided” by the API shift, having been given 30 days’ notice to change their apps.
Strava notes in a post on its forum in the Developers & API section that, per its guidelines, “posts requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted.”
Too often, new tech product or service launches seem like solutions in search of a problem, but not this one: ESPN is launching software that lets you figure out just where you can watch the specific game you want to see amid an overcomplicated web of streaming services, cable channels, and arcane licensing agreements. Every sports fan is all too familiar with today’s convoluted streaming schedules.
Launching today on ESPN.com and the various ESPN mobile and streaming device apps, the new guide offers various views, including one that lists all the sporting events in a single day and a search function, among other things. You can also flag favorite sports or teams to customize those views.
“At the core of Where to Watch is an event database created and managed by the ESPN Stats and Information Group (SIG), which aggregates ESPN and partner data feeds along with originally sourced information and programming details from more than 250 media sources, including television networks and streaming platforms,” ESPN’s press release says.
ESPN previously offered browsable lists of games like this, but it didn’t identify where you could actually watch all the games.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll have access to the services needed to watch the games in the list, though. Those of us who cut the cable cord long ago know that some games—especially those local to your city—are unavailable without cable.
For example, I live within walking distance from Wrigley Field, but because I don’t have cable, I can’t watch most Cubs games on any screens in my home. As a former Angeleno, I follow the Dodgers instead because there are no market blackouts for me watching them all the way from Chicago. The reverse would be true if I were in LA.
Even if you do have cable, many sports are incredibly convoluted when it comes to figuring out where to watch stuff. ESPN Where to Watch could be useful for the new college football season, for example.
Expansion effort
ESPN isn’t the first company to envision this, though. The company to make the most progress up until now was Apple. Apple’s TV device and app was initially meant as a one-stop shop for virtually all streaming video, like a comprehensive 21st-century TV Guide. But with cable companies being difficult to work with and Netflix not participating, Apple never quite made that dream a reality.
It kept trying for sports, though, tying into third-party offerings like the MLB app alongside its own programming to try to make the TV app a place to launch all your games. Apple got pretty close, depending on which sport you’re trying to follow.
ESPN’s app seems a little more promising, as it covers a more comprehensive range of games and goes beyond the TV app’s “what’s happening right now” focus with better search and listings.
ESPN execs have said they hope to start offering more games streaming directly in the app, and if that app becomes the go-to spot thanks to this new guide, it might give the company more leverage with leagues to make that happen.
That could certainly be more convenient for viewers, though there are, of course, downsides to one company having too much influence and leverage in a sport.
A US judge has temporarily blocked the launch of a sports streaming service formed by Disney’s ESPN, Warner Bros and Fox, finding that it was likely to “substantially lessen competition” in the market.
The service, dubbed Venu, was expected to launch later this year. But FuboTV, a sports-focused streaming platform, filed an antitrust suit in February to block it, arguing its business would “suffer irreparable harm” as a result.
On Friday, US District Judge Margaret Garnett in New York granted an injunction to halt the launch of the service while Fubo’s lawsuit against the entertainment giants works its way through the court.
The opinion was sealed but the judge noted in an entry on the court docket that Fubo was “likely to succeed on its claims” that by entering the agreement, the companies “will substantially lessen competition and restrain trade in the relevant market” in violation of antitrust law.
In a statement, ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery said they planned to appeal against the decision.
Venu was aimed at US consumers who had either ditched their traditional pay TV packages for streaming or never signed up for a cable subscription. “Cord cutting” has been eroding the traditional TV business for years, but live sports has remained a primary draw for customers who have held on to their cable subscriptions.
Fubo TV was launched in 2015 as a sports-focused streamer. It offers more than 350 channels—including those carrying major sporting events such as Premier League football matches, baseball, the National Football League and the US National Basketball Association—for monthly subscription prices starting at $79.99. Its offerings included networks owned by Disney and Fox.
ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros said Venu was “pro-competitive,” aimed at reaching “viewers who currently are not served by existing subscription options.”
Venu was expected to charge $42.99 a month when it launched later this month. It “will feature just 15 channels, all featuring popular live sports—the kind of skinny sports bundle that Fubo has tried to offer for nearly a decade, only to encounter tooth-and-nail resistance,” Fubo said in a court filing seeking the injunction.
Venu was expected to aggregate about $16 billion worth of sports rights, analysts have estimated. It was not expected to have an impact on the individual companies’ ability to strike new rights deals.
Analysts had questioned its position in the marketplace. Disney plans to roll out ESPN as a “flagship” streaming service in August 2025 that will carry programming that appears on the TV network as well as gaming, shopping and other interactive content. Disney chief executive Bob Iger said he wants the service to become the “pre-eminent digital sports platform.”
Fubo shares rose 16.8 percent after the ruling, but the stock is down 51 percent this year.
Enlarge/ Al Michaels looks on prior to the game between the Minnesota Vikings and Philadelphia Eagles at Lincoln Financial Field on September 14, 2023, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
On Wednesday, NBC announced plans to use an AI-generated clone of famous sports commentator Al Michaels‘ voice to narrate daily streaming video recaps of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, which start on July 26. The AI-powered narration will feature in “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock,” NBC’s streaming service. But this new, high-profile use of voice cloning worries critics, who say the technology may muscle out upcoming sports commentators by keeping old personas around forever.
NBC says it has created a “high-quality AI re-creation” of Michaels’ voice, trained on Michaels’ past NBC appearances to capture his distinctive delivery style.
The veteran broadcaster, revered in the sports commentator world for his iconic “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” call during the 1980 Winter Olympics, has been covering sports on TV since 1971, including a high-profile run of play-by-play coverage of NFL football games for both ABC and NBC since the 1980s. NBC dropped him from NFL coverage in 2023, however, possibly due to his age.
Michaels, who is 79 years old, shared his initial skepticism about the project in an interview with Vanity Fair, as NBC News notes. After hearing the AI version of his voice, which can greet viewers by name, he described the experience as “astonishing” and “a little bit frightening.” He said the AI recreation was “almost 2% off perfect” in mimicking his style.
The Vanity Fair article provides some insight into how NBC’s new AI system works. It first uses a large language model (similar technology to what powers ChatGPT) to analyze subtitles and metadata from NBC’s Olympics video coverage, summarizing events and writing custom output to imitate Michaels’ style. This text is then fed into an unspecified voice AI model trained on Michaels’ previous NBC appearances, reportedly replicating his unique pronunciations and intonations.
NBC estimates that the system could generate nearly 7 million personalized variants of the recaps across the US during the games, pulled from the network’s 5,000 hours of live coverage. Using the system, each Peacock user will receive about 10 minutes of personalized highlights.
A diminished role for humans in the future?
Enlarge/ Al Michaels reports on the Sweden vs. USA men’s ice hockey game at the 1980 Olympic Winter Games on February 12, 1980.
It’s no secret that while AI is wildly hyped right now, it’s also controversial among some. Upon hearing the NBC announcement, critics of AI technology reacted strongly. “@NBCSports, this is gross,” tweeted actress and filmmaker Justine Bateman, who frequently uses X to criticize technologies that might replace human writers or performers in the future.
A thread of similar responses from X users reacting to the sample video provided above included criticisms such as, “Sounds pretty off when it’s just the same tone for every single word.” Another user wrote, “It just sounds so unnatural. No one talks like that.”
The technology will not replace NBC’s regular human sports commentators during this year’s Olympics coverage, and like other forms of AI, it leans heavily on existing human work by analyzing and regurgitating human-created content in the form of captions pulled from NBC footage.
Looking down the line, due to AI media cloning technologies like voice, video, and image synthesis, today’s celebrities may be able to attain a form of media immortality that allows new iterations of their likenesses to persist through the generations, potentially earning licensing fees for whoever holds the rights.
We’ve already seen it with James Earl Jones playing Darth Vader’s voice, and the trend will likely continue with other celebrity voices, provided the money is right. Eventually, it may extend to famous musicians through music synthesis and famous actors in video-synthesis applications as well.
The possibility of being muscled out by AI replicas factored heavily into a Hollywood actors’ strike last year, with SAG-AFTRA union President Fran Drescher saying, “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble. We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”
For companies that like to monetize media properties for as long as possible, AI may provide a way to maintain a media legacy through automation. But future human performers may have to compete against all of the greatest performers of the past, rendered through AI, to break out and forge a new career—provided there will be room for human performers at all.
“Al Michaels became Al Michaels because he was brought in to replace people who died, or retired, or moved on,” tweeted a writer named Geonn Cannon on X. “If he can’t do the job anymore, it’s time to let the next Al Michaels have a shot at it instead of just planting a code-generated ghoul in an empty chair.“
University of Rochester linguist Andrew Bray started out studying the evolution of the trademark sports jargon used in hockey for his master’s thesis. For instance, a hockey arena is a “barn,” while the puck is a “biscuit.” When he would tell people about the project, however, they kept asking if he was trying to determine why American hockey players sound like “fake Canadians.” Intrigued, Bray decided to shift his research focus to find out if hockey players did indeed have distinctively Canadian speech patterns and, if so, why this might be the case.
He discovered that US hockey players borrow certain aspects of the Canadian English accent, particularly when it comes to hockey jargon. But they don’t follow the typical rules of pronunciation. In short, “American hockey players are not trying to shift their speech to sound more Canadian,” Bray said during a press briefing. “They’re trying to sound more like a hockey player. That’s why it’s most evident in hockey-specific terms.”
It’s a concept known as a “linguistic persona,” a means of communicating how one identifies—in this case, as a hockey player— through speech. Bray gave a talk about his research today at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Ottawa, Canada, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association.
Bray first had to figure out how to design a study to examine this question. “What does it even mean to sound like a ‘fake’ Canadian?” he said. The stereotypical Canadian speech patterns are well-known: pronouncing “out” as “oot,” for example, or “about” as “aboot,” not to mention adding a questioning “eh?” at the end of sentences. According to Bray, there are three common linguistic variables typical of Canadian English.
One is called the lower back merger shift, which involves lowering the tongue to pronounce the vowels in words like “bit” (ih), “bet” (eh), and “bat” (ah). The second is called Canadian raising, in which the body of the tongue is raised to pronounce the vowels in words like “tight” and “doubt.” Finally, there are the vowels in words like “bait” and “boat.” Canadians pronounce these vowels with only one configuration of the tongue, known as a monophthongal pronunciation. (If the tongue moves to a secondary configuration, that would be a diphthongal pronunciation.)
Bray thought the American players might be exhibiting some Canadian English variables in their speech but to different degrees, such that their pronunciations sounded just a wee bit off—i.e., “fake.” He opted to focus on the monophthongal component since he thought those pronunciations were likely to be the most prevalent in “fake Canadian” speech among US hockey players.
Enlarge/ Bray used to play hockey for the University of Georgia Ice Dawgs, shown here in 2016.
University of Georgia Ice Dawgs
Next, Bray had to build his own “corpus of hockey player speech” focused on American-born hockey players. That required extensive interviews with players. Professional National League Hockey (NHL) players might not have the time to participate, so he focused on the American Hockey League (AHL) and East Coast Hockey League (ECHL), narrowing his pool to four teams: the Charlotte Checkers, the Greenville Swamp Rabbits, the Rochester Americans, and the South Carolina Stingrays.
Bray played hockey for the University of Georgia Ice Dawgs, which helped him quickly establish a rapport with his subjects over their shared interest and get them talking at length about their hockey career trajectories. Among other benefits, it helped him avoid the dreaded “observer’s paradox,” in which asking someone to talk about their speech makes them self-conscious and subtly changes how they would normally talk. He collected data from 20 such interviews, conducted between 2017 and 2019, each lasting about 30 minutes.
He then turned those interviews into a database of “formants”—resonant frequencies that amplify some groups of harmonics above others in speech. Bray’s ASA presentation focused on two common vowel formants. The first formant (F1) roughly corresponds to tongue height, while the second (F2) corresponds to how far forward or retracted the tongue is during pronunciation.
In the case of “bait”-like vowel sounds, Bray found some evidence among his US hockey players of a monophthongal pronunciation (minimal tongue movement), as one would expect in Canadian English and perhaps parts of the upper Midwest, but which would not otherwise be present in American English dialects. “Boat”-like vowel sounds seemed more “pseudo-monophthongal” in nature. But when these were compared with benchmark expectations for Canadian English F1 and F2 formants, US hockey players came close but fell just a bit short of the mark. Nor are their pronunciations in line with standard American English dialects.
“This might be why they sound ‘fake,'” said Bray. “I’m arguing that this is the construction of a linguistic variant uniquely linked to hockey. It’s influenced by Canadian English, but it’s not entirely Canadian.” And the way the US players in his dataset pronounced “hockey” seems to be “an entirely novel pronunciation of a word linked to this community.” Bray suspects this influence will be relevant to his initial research on hockey slang, expecting to find that “hockey slang terms are pronounced differently than you’d expect for the other non-hockey related terms.”
Bray suspects this happens via some sort of “lexical diffusion.” At the junior league level (around 14 to 20 years of age), US players might not have these distinctive speech patterns, but their pronunciations may gradually shift over time the longer they play and pick up hockey slang terms. The more strongly they self-identify as hockey players, the more they will sound like “fake Canadians.”
All the available Immersive Video launch content fit on a small strip in the TV app.
Samuel Axon
Initial videos were labeled as episodes in a series, but subsequent episodes haven’t come.
Tonight, Apple will debut some new Immersive Video content for the Vision Pro headset—the first sports content for the device. It doesn’t seem like much after two months of no new content, though.
Starting at 6 pm PT/9 pm ET, Vision Pro users will be able to watch a sports film captured for the platform’s Immersive Video format. The video will be a series of highlights from last year’s Major League Soccer (MLS) playoffs, and according to Six Colors, it will run just five minutes. It will be free for all Vision Pro users.
On February 2, Apple released what appeared to be the first episodes of three Immersive Video series: Adventure, Prehistoric Planet, and Wildlife. Each debuted alongside the Vision Pro’s launch with one episode labeled “Episode 1” of “Season 1.”
However, it’s been almost two months, and none of those series have received new episodes. The only other piece of Immersive Video content available is an Alicia Keyes performance video that also debuted on February 2. Most of these videos were only a few minutes long.
That means that this short soccer video depicting sports moments from 2023 will be the only new piece of Immersive Video content Apple has put out since the device launched at the beginning of February.
When I reviewed the Vision Pro as an entertainment device, I lauded its capabilities for viewing 2D films and videos, but I also talked a bit about its 3D video capabilities. I said the first pieces of original 3D content from Apple seemed promising and that I looked forward to future episodes. Given that they were labeled just like Apple TV+ series in the TV app, I assumed they would arrive at a weekly cadence. Further episodes haven’t come.
Notably, Apple didn’t include a first-party app for playing 3D videos downloaded from the web with the Vision Pro, though an independent developer filled that gap with an app called Reality Player. There are a few 3D video streaming or downloading services in the visionOS App Store, but the selection is very anemic compared to what you have access to with other headsets.
Apple hasn’t been calling the Vision Pro a VR headset, opting instead for the term “spatial computing”—and that’s understandable because it does a lot more than most VR headsets.
But if you’re looking for new examples of the sorts of passive viewing content you can enjoy on other headsets, the Vision Pro is still far behind the competition two months in.
The device can display a wealth of 2D video content, but this drives home the initial impression that the Vision Pro is meant for viewing flat, 2D content as windows in 3D space. The situation isn’t quite as dire with apps and games, with a handful of new spatial apps in those categories rolling out in recent weeks.
Most apps behave just like iPad apps, with 2D viewports at the content; you can position those viewports wherever you want in the room around you. Most video content is also 2D.
There are situations where that’s neat to have, but it’s surprising Apple hasn’t invested more in actual 3D content yet. In terms of new stuff, this short soccer video debuting tonight is all we have right now.
Fubo is suing Fox Corporation, The Walt Disney Company, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) over their plans to launch a unified sports streaming app. Fubo, a live sports streaming service that has business relationships with the three companies, claims the firms have engaged in anticompetitive practices for years, leading to higher prices for consumers.
In an attempt to understand how much potential the allegations have to derail the app’s launch, Ars Technica read the 73-page sealed complaint and sought opinions from some antitrust experts. While some of Fubo’s allegations could be hard to prove, Fubo isn’t the only one concerned about the joint app’s potential to make it hard for streaming services to compete fairly.
Fubo wants to kill ESPN, Fox, and WBD’s joint sports app
Earlier this month, Disney, which owns ESPN, WBD (whose sports channels include TBS and TNT), and Fox, which owns Fox broadcast stations and Fox Sports channels like FS1, announced plans to launch an equally owned live sports streaming app this fall. Pricing hasn’t been confirmed but is expected to be in the $30-to-$50-per-month range. Fubo, for comparison, starts at $80 per month for English-language channels.
Via a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Fubo is seeking an injunction against the app and joint venture (JV), a jury trial, and damages for an unspecified figure. There have been reports that Fubo was suing the three companies for $1 billion, but a Fubo spokesperson confirmed to Ars that this figure is incorrect.
“Insurmountable barriers”
Fubo, which was founded in 2015, is arguing that the three companies’ proposed app will result in higher prices for live sports streaming customers.
The New York City-headquartered company claims the collaboration would preclude other distributors of live sports content, like Fubo, from competing fairly. The lawsuit also claims that distributors like Fubo would see higher prices and worse agreements associated with licensing sports content due to the JV, which could even stop licensing critical sports content to companies like Fubo. Fubo’s lawsuit says that “once they have combined forces, Defendants’ incentive to exclude Fubo and other rivals will only increase.”
Disney, Fox, and WBD haven’t disclosed specifics about how their JV will impact how they license the rights to sports events to companies outside of their JV; however, they have claimed that they will license their respective entities to the JV on a non-exclusive basis.
That statement doesn’t specify, though, if the companies will try to bundle content together forcibly,
“If the three firms get together and say, ‘We’re no longer going to provide to you these streams for resale separately. You must buy a bundle as a condition of getting any of them,’ that would … be an anti-competitive bundle that can be challenged under antitrust law,” Hal Singer, an economics professor at The University of Utah and managing director at Econ One, told Ars.
Lee Hepner, counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, shared similar concerns about the JV with Ars:
Joint ventures raise the same concerns as mergers when the effect is to shut out competitors and gain power to raise prices and reduce quality. Sports streaming is an extremely lucrative market, and a joint venture between these three powerhouses will foreclose the ability of rivals like Fubo to compete on fair terms.
Fubo’s lawsuit cites research from Citi, finding that, combined, ESPN (26.8 percent), Fox (17.3 percent), and WBD (9.9 percent) own 54 percent of the US sports rights market.
In a statement, Fubo co-founder and CEO David Gandler said the three companies “are erecting insurmountable barriers that will effectively block any new competitors” and will leave sports streamers without options.
The US Department of Justice is reportedly eyeing the JV for an antitrust review and plans to look at the finalized terms, according to a February 15 Bloomberg report citing two anonymous “people familiar with the process.”
The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup is on – and celebrations aren’t limited to the physical world. A number of innovative activations on Snapchat ensure that fans everywhere can feel like a part of the action.
Snap’s 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup Lenses
While AR activations can be fun, they don’t often add much real value for people actually following the sport. Snap’s USWNT (the US Women’s National Team) Team Tracker Lens uses brand new tech and classic Snapchat style to display real-time team and player information. Another lens can be used to preview Stories augmented with content from the U.S. Soccer App.
Curious about other teams to follow? A lens created with FIFA’s “Fancestry” quiz helps fans follow new teams based on a brief personality survey – with a unique digital jersey representing your “Fancestry.”
Whatever team (or teams) you choose to support during 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, you can show your colors with the Across the Globe Lens with a different selfie lens for every team.
Or, show your support for women’s sports in general with the TOGETHXR Lens. And, of course, all of the teams have their own stickers and bitmoji fashions to further customize your communications.
“Snapchat is honored to be a part of the 2023 World Cup,” Snap’s Strategic Partnerships Sports Lead Emma Wakely said in a release. “Through immersive content coverage, creator collaborations, and new, innovative AR experiences, Snapchatters will have an unparalleled opportunity to express their football fandom like never before.”
Snapchat’s Playbook
Snap’s strategy for the package is an interesting play. For the most part, the engagements are more stylized than those employed last year for the (Mens) World Cup Snapchat celebrations. However, these interactions are more … interactive. Though, Snap’s Live Garment Transfer Technology does make a comeback for an AR jersey activation similar to the one we saw last year.
Perhaps the most in-depth lens in terms of interactivity is the USWNT Team Lens. This activation is most like a multi-player partnership through which Snap augmented the Superbowl last year – but that app was only for fans physically at the Superbowl. And what is AR for if not for expanding experiences to people who can’t be at one given physical location?
Don’t forget, the Snap team isn’t the only one making lenses. To find all lenses, including those made through partnerships or by independent creators, tap the explore tab on the Snapchat camera screen and search “Women’s World Cup” or “2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.”
Celebrate the Big Games
This has just been a look at Snapchat’s AR integrations around the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. There are also special Stories, Cameo content, Spotlight Challenges, Snap Map features, and more. So pick your team and go crazy.
Whether you’re an American fan of British football, or a citizen of the British Commonwealth spending time in the States, the Premier League Summer Series might be just what the doctor ordered.
The first-ever Premier League Summer Series will see six football clubs face off in five US cities from July 22 to July 30. Even if you can’t watch the matches live and in person, you can find trophies thanks to an AR experience from ROSE.
“The Hunt Is On.” – Celebrating the Summer Series in AR
Over the years, digital experience company ROSE has worked with industry giants including Mastercard, KHAITE, Patrón, adidas, Bloomingdales, and others. A current partnership with the Premier League and UK strategic consultancy and creative studio Doppelgänger might be their biggest partnership yet – and there are no tickets required.
“Doppelgänger created the idea of an augmented reality-powered trophy hunt experience for fans and in looking for an expert partner in the space, enlisted ROSE to advise on how the experience could be executed and ultimately design and build the experience,” ROSE Associate Creative Director Nicole Riemer told ARPost.
According to Managing Director at Doppelgänger, Max Proctor, “AR and broader metaverse activations are helping the world’s biggest brands to build loyalty and engagement with their audiences by connecting with them in new and exciting ways.”
The Summer Series is a major sporting event and is bringing in even more people into the experience than into the stadiums. Organizers turned to ROSE and WebXR authoring and hosting company 8th Wall – a duo that has worked together on multiple large-scale applications.
“Having been a long-time partner with 8th Wall, we are always looking for new ways to use their technology and use cases that push the way augmented can be used as well as made more accessible for brands,” said Riemer. “In this case study we utilized a number of 8th Wall’s newer features including face segmentation and sky segmentation.”
Experiencing the Summer Series
There are different ways to interact with the activation depending on whether you’re in or around any of the cities. That’s right, you can still join in on the fun, even if you aren’t in any of the cities hosting the Summer Series.
The five cities hosting the Summer Series are:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Atlanta, Georgia,
Orlando, Florida,
Harrison, New Jersey, and
Landover, Maryland.
“Since the Summer Series is only in five cities, not every fan will have the opportunity to come to a game, but that doesn’t mean that they support their favorite teams any less,” said Riemer. “We created the at-home experience as a way for fans anywhere in the United States to show their support for their team and experience the Premier League trophy.”
Exploring Host Cities
If you’re in one or more of those cities between now and July 19, you can use the Premier League Trophy Hunt mobile AR experience to look for 20 augmented reality trophies (that’s one for each club in the Premier League). Naturally, you need to enter your location to hunt for the AR trophies.
For each trophy that fans find, they get one entry into sweepstakes for tickets to the games. Fans who find all of the trophies get one entry into another drawing for a signed Premier League jersey.
Supporting Teams From Home
If you’re a fan of the Premier League but won’t be in one of the host cities, you can still engage in the web experience, if differently. Fans anywhere can view the Premier League Trophy in augmented reality, use face filters, and post the results to social media.
Further, you don’t have to allow your location to use the experience from home. Just pick your favorite team – or join in as a “General Premier League Fan.” You can still have all of the fun of viewing and collecting all of the trophies.
There are also special entries that you can join in without finding hidden trophies in the host cities. Or, don’t join the entries and just have fun with the filters. The at-home experience is live until July 31.
Supporting Your Team With ROSE
The Premier League is coming stateside. That’s exciting whether it’s coming to a town near you or not.
“We are honored to have such a passionate Premier League fanbase in the USA, and are very excited to be giving them the chance to experience the Premier League Summer Series on home soil for the very first time,”said Alexandra Willis, Director of Digital Media and Audience Development at the Premier League.
Thanks to ROSE and their partners, fans anywhere can interact with their favorite football clubs in new and amusing ways.
