Disney and DirecTV are locked in a carriage dispute that could see ESPN go dark just as the college football season begins and “Monday Night Football” kicks off with the New York Jets battling the San Francisco 49ers.
The Mouse House, which owns ESPN, is locked in renewal discussions with DirecTV ahead of its current deal’s expiration on Sunday.
If the two sides do not reach an agreement by then, DirecTV’s more than 11 million subscribers will be forced to scramble for an alternative to watch Disney content.
That includes the return of Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers on Monday after he missed most of last season to an injury and a slate of college football games highlighted by defending champion Michigan taking on Texas on Sept. 7.
A carriage dispute between Disney and Charter Communications, Spectrum’s parent, led to a nearly two-week blackout around this time last year, and was resolved hours before ESPN’s “MNF” opener that pitted the Jets vs. the Buffalo Bills.
But things may go differently this time around due in part to a recent ruling that has rocked the sports media world.
Earlier this month, a federal judge in New York’s Southern District issued a temporary injunction preventing the launch of Venu, a new sports streaming service from Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery.
The judge said the service could cause “irreparable harm” to sports streaming service Fubo and to consumers, adding that Venu would be giving rights to sports content that was not bundled with other programming — “for the first time ever.”
Most contracts have required pay TV distributors to charge subscribers for all of a company’s channels whether they want them or not. For instance, DirecTV subscribers may watch ESPN and ESPN 2 but not the Disney Junior channel and FX.
DirecTV chief content officer Rob Thun said in a blog post last week that his firm’s current negotiations with Disney have been colored by the judge’s ruling, and that he wants to offer “smaller, more tailored packages at prices that reflect” value to consumers.
Aside from ESPN, other Disney-owned channels on DirecTV include ESPN2, ESPN Deportes, Disney Channel, Disney Junior, Disney XD, FX, FX Movie Channel, Freeform, National Geographic and Nat Geo Wild.
DirecTV’s requirement to include all of a content provider’s channels into its service forces “pay TV customers to subscribe to many channels they may not watch, which have yielded ‘fat bundles’,” Thun wrote.
“At the same time, programmers have reserved flexible genre-based offerings solely for themselves, eroding the price-value proposition for pay TV customers by shifting the best programming to (their own direct-to-customer streaming) services while raising programming fees on pay TV,” he added.
“They have not engaged in earnest on proposals we’ve made to them” for customized packages of channels, President of Disney Platform Distribution Justin Connolly told Deadline on Tuesday. “They’re trying to lay the blame for their lack of investment in their platform at the feet of programmers.”
TV providers have been crushed by the exodus from cable to streaming services.
In 2023, DirecTV shed an estimated 1.8 million subscribers, leaving it with roughly 11.3 million at the year’s end, down from 16 million subscribers at the end of 2019, according to the Leichtman Research Group.
