Disney and DirecTV are locked in a battle over streaming rights that could see ESPN go off the air just as the college football season gets underway and “Monday Night Football” gets underway with the New York Jets taking on the San Francisco 49ers.
The Mouse House, which owns ESPN, is in contract renewal talks with DirecTV ahead of the expiration of their current agreement on Sunday.
If the two sides don't reach an agreement by then, DirecTV's more than 11 million subscribers will be forced to scramble to find alternative ways to watch Disney content.
That includes the return of Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers on Monday after missing most of last season with an injury, as well as a highly-anticipated college football game on Sept. 7 between defending champion Michigan and Texas.
A transportation dispute between Disney and Spectrum's parent company, Charter Communications, which caused a nearly two-week blackout around this time last year, was resolved just hours ago. ESPN's “MNF” opener Jets vs Buffalo Bills.
But because of a recent ruling that has rocked the sports media world, things may be different this time.
Earlier this month, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction blocking 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 consumers, adding that it would be “the first time ever” that Venu would grant rights to sports content that isn't bundled with other programming.
Most contracts require pay-TV distributors to charge subscribers for all of the company's channels, whether they want them or not. For example, DirecTV subscribers can watch ESPN and ESPN 2, but not the Disney Junior channel or FX.
Rob Toon, chief content officer at DirecTV, Blog Post He said last week that his company's current negotiations with Disney depend on the judge's ruling and that he wants to offer “smaller, more tailored packages” at prices that reflect value to consumers.
Besides ESPN, other Disney-owned channels available on DirecTV include ESPN2, ESPN Deportes, Disney Channel, Disney Junior, Disney XD, FX, FX Movie Channel, Freeform, National Geographic and Nat Geo Wild.
Because DirecTV requires content providers to include all of their channels on its service, “pay-TV customers are forced to subscribe to many channels they may never watch, resulting in 'fat bundles,'” Toon wrote.
“At the same time, producers are reserving their flexible, genre-based programming for themselves, increasing pay-TV programming prices while shifting their best programming to their own (direct-to-consumer streaming) services, undermining the price-value proposition to pay-TV customers,” he added.
“They have not taken seriously the proposals we made for customized channel packages,” said Justin Connolly, president of Disney Platform Distribution. He told Deadline “They are trying to hold programmers responsible for the lack of investment in their platforms,” he said Tuesday.
Television providers have been hit hard by the shift from cable to streaming services.
DirecTV is expected to lose an estimated 1.8 million subscribers in 2023, bringing its total to about 11.3 million at the end of the year, down from 16 million subscribers at the end of 2019, according to Leichtman Research Group.
