Disney finds itself at the center of another major television service controversy: its channels are now no longer available in millions of homes.
This time, the company and satellite TV giant DirecTV are at odds: Several Disney channels, including ABC and ESPN, will no longer be available to DirecTV customers.
“The Walt Disney Co. is once again refusing to take responsibility for its consumers, its distribution partners and now the American justice system,” Rob Thun, DirecTV’s chief content officer, said in a statement following the channels’ shutdown. “Disney is committed to creating alternative realities, but this is the real world where we believe you earn your way and are accountable for your actions. They want to continue their pursuit of 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, released their own statement, which reads: “DirecTV has chosen to deny millions of subscribers access to our content just as we head into the final week of the U.S. Open and prepare for college football and the NFL season opener. While we are open to offering DirecTV the flexibility and terms we have extended to other distributors, we will not enter into a deal that undervalues our portfolio of channels and television programming. We invest significantly in providing the No. 1 brands in entertainment, news and sports because that is what our viewers expect and deserve. We urge DirecTV to do what is in the best interest of their customers and finalize a deal that would immediately restore our programming.”
A year ago, Disney Channels went offline for two weeks for Charter Spectrum subscribers in a high-stakes dispute that Charter framed as over the future of pay TV. The two sides ultimately struck a deal that made Disney+ and ESPN+ available to Charter Spectrum subscribers at no additional cost, but also saw Disney agree to cut some of its cable channels from the provider’s schedule.
Charter is the country’s largest pay-TV provider with about 13 million subscribers, and the outage had a significant impact on both companies’ bottom lines. DirecTV isn’t nearly as big (it has an estimated 11 million between its satellite and streaming offerings), but it’s still one of the country’s largest TV providers.
DirecTV telegraphed that it was preparing for a fight on August 21, when it published an open letter from Thun outlining his vision for “A Brighter Television Future,” in which companies like DirecTV could sell “genre-based” packages across news, family and sports. While the letter didn’t specifically target Disney, it’s clear it was written with the current dispute in mind.
“Distributors like DirecTV have been asking programmers for the flexibility to launch thinner packages for years. It’s time to work together to bring that ocean of opportunity to fruition,” Thun wrote.
But Justin Connolly, Disney's president of distribution, said The Hollywood Reporter that the company was willing to make concessions in this regard, but to no avail.
“I think, or I know, they’re trying to spin and push this narrative that they want to explore more flexible and thinner packages and that we refuse to engage in that, and the bottom line is that’s patently false, and we’ve been negotiating with them for weeks, and we’ve proposed a number of flexible options… but they still haven’t engaged with us on the options,” Connolly says.
“There's still a little bit of a toss-up, both publicly and in the room, about these ideas that don't have a lot of specificity and, you know, from our perspective, don't seem like they're easily achievable,” he added. “It continues to be a challenge.