DirecTV and Disney has reached a deal to bring Disney’s ESPN and other channels back to the pay-TV provider’s customers after about two weeks of being off the air.
The deal comes in time for this Saturday’s college football game, which will air on ABC, ESPN, the SEC Network and the ACC Network, as well as the Emmy Awards, which will air on ABC. CNBC previously reported that the deal could be done as early as Saturday.
Disney’s TV channels were shut down on September 1 after the two sides could not agree on terms for fees and a service package structure. The dispute left more than 11 million DirecTV customers without access to the U.S. Open, college football and this year’s “Monday Night Football” season opener.
DirecTV executives began calling for the possibility of offering smaller, genre-specific packages to customers in the weeks leading up to the dispute, and again when the Disney networks were shut down. Disney has said DirecTV’s offerings don’t reflect the value its networks provide.
On Saturday, DirecTV and Disney said they had reached an agreement that outlines “market-based terms” on pricing.
The deal also gives DirecTV the opportunity to offer a variety of genre-specific options, such as sports, entertainment, kids and family, including Disney’s traditional TV networks, along with its Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ streaming services.
DirecTV will be able to offer Disney streaming services in its service packages and on demand, the company said in a statement released Saturday. DirecTV has also acquired the rights to distribute Disney upcoming ESPN’s flagship direct-to-consumer streaming service — scheduled to launch in fall 2025 — comes at no additional cost to subscribers.
The inclusion of Disney’s streaming services and ESPN’s future flagship service reflects the carriage agreement reached between Charter Communications and Disney last year after a similar outage. Charter and Disney have reached an agreement in time for the first week of “Monday Night Football.”
In a joint statement, DirecTV and Disney called this a “first-of-its-kind collaboration” because it gives “customers the ability to customize their video experience through more flexible options.”
The blackout has highlighted the importance of live sports to the media companies that own the rights to broadcast matches as well as the pay-TV providers that want to air them.
Since September 1, both sides have accused the other of stalling the deal. DirecTV has called Disney anti-consumer, and ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro has called DirecTV’s response to Disney’s package offers “basically hypothetical.”
In a power outage, companies, customers, and other business owners all seem to suffer.
“We never want to lose signal. It’s not good for either party. It’s certainly not good for the customer. We’ve done everything we can,” ESPN’s Pitaro told CNBC last week.
DirecTV Chief Marketing Officer Vince Torres said at Goldman Sachs’ Technology & Communacopia Conference on Thursday that the number of customers DirecTV lost in the dispute was not “insignificant.”
Torres said DirecTV offered customers a $30 credit, funded by stopping payments to Disney as soon as the outages began.
During the dispute, many small business owners were also unable to offer the full range of sports they normally would. Many bars and restaurants rely on DirecTV as a commercial distributor of the NFL.”Sunday Tickets“out-of-market game packages — which are not affected by the ban — and therefore use pay-TV providers for the rest of their TV content, including ESPN.
In addition to sports, outages also occurred during Tuesday’s presidential debate, leaving customers in some markets unable to access Disney’s ABC broadcast network.
Disney tried to temporarily allow DirecTV to carry ABC to its customers that night, but the pay-TV provider refused. DirecTV called it a public relations stunt and said it did not believe it was necessary to open ABC because the debate was also being aired on several other news channels.
Antitrust in the media sector has come under close scrutiny in recent weeks following Venu, the joint streaming venture between Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox Corporation. and Disney, is temporarily blocked of an antitrust judge. Fubo TV originally filed the lawsuit and DirecTV and Echo of the Stars‘s Dish has supported it ever since.
Last week, DirectTV said it filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission that Disney had failed to negotiate in good faith. The FCC has rules that require broadcast owners to do so. Saturday’s release did not specify the status of the complaint, but sources told CNBC the complaint is “still active.”
The entire pay-TV bundle has been disrupted in recent years as customers have turned to streaming services and other forms of entertainment in place of the traditional structure. This shift has fragmented the media ecosystem, and live sports — especially Disney’s ESPN — is seen as the linchpin that holds the bundle together due to its high viewership.
DirecTV is in the midst of an advertising campaign to remind consumers that they’re more than just a satellite TV company — they have streaming packagealso.
