• Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery have canceled Venu, a would-be sports streaming service.
• The companies announced the decision days after announcing plans to launch the service.
• What happened in between?

On Monday, the people behind Venu — the sports streaming service co-owned by Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery — were gearing up their launch plans after solving a legal challenge.

A few days later, they decided to kill the service entirely — though it looks like what will amount to a different version of the original idea may end up launching, anyway.

Disney, Fox and WBD announced plans for Venu nearly a year ago and initially scheduled a debut in the fall of 2024. But that joint venture will never see the light of day, the three companies announced Friday morning.

The reasoning behind the astonishing decision, via sources at the three companies: the premise of even more legal challenges, which could delay the streamer even more and cost the companies time and money.

While the Venu joint venture settled an antitrust lawsuit with the streaming TV service Fubo on Monday, that decision drew immediate complaints from other TV providers, who said they were being prevented from launching a similar service.

The satellite TV services DirecTV and Dish both sent letters this week to the federal judge who had been overseeing the Fubo court case, arguing that the settlement was a "payoff" and suggesting that they would file their own suits. Other TV providers might launch similar objections, people at the joint-venture companies say.

So on Thursday, Venu's owners decided to bail completely. "In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels," the companies said Friday.

That end of Venu doesn't affect the deal Disney announced this week to essentially buy Fubo itself: It's merging its Hulu + Live TV service with Fubo and will own 70% of the company once that deal is closed.

And part of that deal will give Fubo the right to launch a new "skinny" bundle of Disney properties that show sports, like ESPN and ABC.

On Monday, when Fubo and the joint-venture partners announced a settlement, Fubo executives also told investors that they had a new distribution agreement with Fox, and suggested that Fox would be part of that skinny bundle as well.

Which would mean that Fubo would end up with the rights to sell a service that looks a lot like Venu — minus the programming WBD was supposed to provide. It seems likely that for now WBD will sit pat with its existing distribution plans — relying primarily on its TNT network, some of which also streams on its Max platform.

Which means Fubo, which a year ago was an also-ran streamer that was shut out of a crucial sports streaming deal, now seems like "the undisputed winner" of the entire mess, as an industry executive told me Friday morning.

A Fubo rep said the company had no news to announce regarding a possible Fox deal. Fox declined to comment.

What does this mean for viewers? It's hard to say: The initial announcement about the Venu joint venture seemed like a very big deal. But it was an open question whether sports viewers would pay $43 for a service that had a lot of sports — but not all the sports, including some major parts of the NFL schedule.

Meanwhile, Disney is continuing with plans to launch its own ESPN-only service this fall. And in addition to the Fubo "skinny bundle" the two companies announced, Disney has licensed a similar deal with DirecTV. All of which means there are going to be lots of ways to watch, and pay for, ESPN in the next year or so.