Paramount & NBC Bosses On Venu Sports: “We Weren’t Hurt By Not Being Invited” — IMG-RedBird Summit

deadline.com:

Paramount‘s George Cheeks and NBC‘s Jon Miller aren’t having sleepless nights over Venu Sports. The pair addressed the topic of the Disney-, Fox- and Warner Bros.

Discovery-backed sports streamer, whose launch has been delayed by a legal challenge, at the IMG-RedBird Summit in the UK yesterday, detailing how their companies had reacted to being excluded from the project.

NBC Sports President of Acquisition & Partnerships Miller in particular didn’t pull any punches over not being part of the club, questioning how it would attract subscribers when several key sporting events would not be offered. “I think of it both as a broadcaster and a programmer, but also as a sports fan,” he said. “Why would you ever invest in a property that loses basically 45% of the NFL, has none of the golf major championships, loses half of motorsports in NASCAR, loses March Madness every other year and will lose half of the NBA opportunity because Amazon and NBC have two NBA packages? “To me, it would be fool’s gold to invest in something like this when you can get all of that stuff by going through your cable subscription or buying a YouTube TV subscription.

So, we weren’t invited, [but] we’re very happy with the hand that we have right now. We’re continually looking to grow, make partnerships and be in business with people who see the value in what we bring to the table.” His comments came in the same week NBCUniversal Media Group Chairman Mark Lazarus told a Front Office Sports conference that Venu was an “incomplete service.” Cheeks, one of the trio running CBS and Paramount+ parent Paramount, was slightly more circumspect, but broadly struck a similar tone when assessing the Venu Sports bundle’s upside. “We weren’t hurt by not being