Disney’s DirecTV cart dispute could be disastrous for football fans

Disney and DirecTV are locked in a cart dispute that could cause ESPN to go dark just as the college football season begins and Monday Night Football kicks off with the New York Jets taking on the San Francisco 49ers.

Mouse House, which owns ESPN, is locked in renewal discussions with DirecTV before the current deal expires on Sunday.

If the two sides don’t reach a deal 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 with an injury and a string of college football games, highlighted by defending champion Michigan taking on Texas on September 7.

A shipping dispute between Disney and Spectrum’s parent Charter Communications led to a nearly two-week outage around this time last year and was resolved hours before ESPN’s “MNF” opener pitting the Jets against Buffalo Bills.

But things may be different this time in part because of a recent decision that has rocked the sports media world.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York 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 grant 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 to or not. For example, DirecTV subscribers can watch ESPN and ESPN 2 but not Disney Junior 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 decision and that he wants to offer “smaller, more tailored packages at prices that reflect” value to consumers.

In addition to 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 in its service forces “TV customers to pay to subscribe to many channels they cannot watch, which has led to ‘fat bundles ‘” Thun wrote.

“At the same time, programmers have reserved flexible genre-based offerings for themselves, eroding the value proposition for pay-TV customers by moving the best programming to services (streaming them directly to the customer) by increasing pay-TV programming fees,” he added.

“They haven’t seriously engaged in the proposals that we’ve made to them” for custom channel packages, Disney Platform Distribution President Justin Connolly told Deadline on Tuesday. “They are trying to lay the blame for the lack of investment in their platform at the feet of the programmers.”

TV providers have been squeezed by the exodus from cable services to broadcast.

In 2023, DirecTV lost about 1.8 million subscribers, leaving it with roughly 11.3 million at the end of the year, down from 16 million at the end of 2019, according to Leichtman Research Group.