Disney finds itself at the center of another major TV carriage dispute, with its channels now unavailable in millions of homes.
This time, the company and the satellite TV giant DirecTV find themselves at odds, with a number of Disney channels including ABC and ESPN going dark for DirecTV customers.
The channels went dark shortly before the high-profile LSU-USC college football game and in the middle of the U.S. Open tennis tournament. The NFL season kicks off in a week.
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“The Walt Disney Co. is once again refusing any accountability to consumers, distribution partners, and now the American judicial system,” said Rob Thun, chief content officer at DirecTV, in a statement following the channels going black. “Disney is in the business of creating alternate realities, but this is the real world where we believe you earn your way and must answer for your own actions. They want to continue to chase maximum profits and dominant control at the expense of consumers – making it harder for them to select the shows and sports they want at a reasonable price.”
Dana Walden and Alan Bergman, co-chairmen of Disney Entertainment, and Jimmy Pitaro, chairman of ESPN put out their own statement, which reads, “DirecTV chose to deny millions of subscribers access to our content just as we head into the final week of the U.S. Open and gear up for college football and the opening of the NFL season. While we’re open to offering DirecTV flexibility and terms which we’ve extended to other distributors, we will not enter into an agreement that undervalues our portfolio of television channels and programs. We invest significantly to deliver the No. 1 brands in entertainment, news and sports because that’s what our viewers expect and deserve. We urge DirecTV to do what’s in the best interest of their customers and finalize a deal that would immediately restore our programming.”
A year ago, Disney’s channels went dark for two weeks for Charter Spectrum subscribers in a high-stakes dispute that Charter framed as being about the future of pay TV. Ultimately, the two sides cut a deal that made Disney+ and ESPN+ available to Charter Spectrum subscribers at no extra cost but also saw Disney agree to cut loose some of its cable channels from the provider’s lineup.
Charter is the largest pay-TV provider in the country with about 13 million subscribers, and the blackout had a notable impact on both company’s bottom lines. DirecTV is not quite that big (it is estimated to have about 11 million between its satellite TV and streaming offerings), but it is nonetheless one of the largest providers of TV in the country.
DirecTV had telegraphed that it was preparing for a fight on Aug. 21, when it released an open letter from Thun outlining his vision for “A brighter TV future,” one in which companies like DirecTV could sell “genre-based” packages around news, family and sports. While the letter did not dwell on Disney specifically, it is clear that it was written with the current dispute in mind.
“Distributors like DirecTV have asked programmers for the flexibility to launch skinnier packages for years.It is high time that we work together to bring that ocean of opportunity to fruition,” Thun wrote.
But Justin Connolly, Disney’s president of distribution, told The Hollywood Reporter that the company has been willing to make concessions in that respect, to no avail.
“I think, or I know, that they are trying to spin and push this narrative that they want to explore more flexible, skinnier bundles and that we refuse to engage on that, and bottom line: That is blatantly false, and we’ve been negotiating with them for weeks, and we proposed a variety of flexible options … but yet they haven’t engaged with us on the options,” Connolly says.
“They just continue to sort of spin, both publicly but also in the room, a little bit on these ideas that don’t have a lot of specificity to them, and, you know, from our perspective, don’t feel like they can be executed easily,” he added. “That continues to be a challenge.
