Disney is asking YouTube TV to restore ABC to its pay-TV bundle for Election Day on Tuesday as a matter of “public interest” as the companies negotiate a carriage renewal.
ABC, ESPN and other Disney networks went dark Thursday night after the distribution talks failed to yield a deal. Already, college football on Saturday has been wiped out, and Monday Night Football featuring the perennially high-rated Dallas Cowboys appears to be the next casualty of the standoff.
In a statement provided to Deadline, a Disney spokesperson said: “Despite the impasse that led to the current blackout, we have asked YouTube TV to restore ABC for Election Day so subscribers have access to the information they rely on. We believe in putting the public interest first and hope YouTube TV will take this small step for their customers while we continue to work toward a fair agreement.”
A YouTube rep did not immediately respond to Deadline’s request for comment on the Disney request.
YouTube TV, which launched in 2017, has grown into a dominant pay-TV provider with 10 million subscribers. Given its growing scale, the operator has had a string of high-profile carriage battles with major programmers. TelevisaUnivision’s networks have been dark since late-September, but NBCUniversal, Fox Corp. and Paramount all reached agreements without blackouts.
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For its part, Disney has been willing to risk blackouts at times in order to further its strategic objectives as it balances declining linear tune-in with its direct-to-consumer streaming operations. In 2023 and 2024, it had high-profile blackouts with Charter Communications’ Spectrum systems and DirecTV, respectively. The DirecTV outage coincided with a debate between then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris. DirecTV rejected Disney’s request to restore ABC temporarily in that situation.
Unlike sports, broadcast network news programming is fairly widely available outside of the traditional linear bundle. Disney several years ago started putting ABC World News Tonight and other news programming on Hulu.
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