Though a full weekend of college football and NFL action, ESPN and ABC were not available to millions of YouTube TV subscribers.
The first slate of missed games may not be the last.
Via Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, Google and Disney “remain far apart” in their positions. The major issue, as it always seems to be, is money. Google, per Karp, wants rates similar to what major cable providers like Charter/Spectrum and Comcast pay for the various Disney-owned channels. The fact that YouTube TV doesn’t have the same number of subscribers has prompted Disney to resist.
Meanwhile, ESPN continues to use its highly-compensated employees to spread the Gospel according to Mickey. The overt social-media shilling doesn’t seem to be resonating with the masses, who (correctly) are resisting the idea of pointing a finger at one side or the other and blaming both.
It’s not complicated. Get in a room, lock the door, and do the deal. It’s going to happen, eventually. Make it happen. Give a little. Get a little. Emerge from the negotiations with the best possible outcome: A compromise that leaves both companies equal parts satisfied and disappointed.
Caught in the middle are the consumers, who had to come up with alternative mechanisms for watching the Cardinals-Cowboys game on Monday night. And standing on the sidelines, apparently, is the NFL, which could pull a Moe Howard and clunk heads together, if it wanted.
Inevitably, ESPN will issue a P.R.-manicured announcement bragging about last night’s viewership. Whatever it is, it surely will be lower than it would have been. And that hurts the NFL, which wants maximum eyeballs on its games.
If the NFL is working behind the scenes to try to resolve the issue, the NFL is doing a great job of keeping those efforts quiet. Regardless, the league absolutely should be doing something.
There was no short-term agreement that allowed last night’s game to stream on YouTube TV. Karp notes that Disney had suggested a Tuesday pause for election coverage, but Google declined.
Disney’s motivation for making the election-day pitch is obvious. There are many other networks that will be covering the drip-drip of election returns. But there was no other way to watch Monday Night Football on YouTube TV.
We won’t take sides in any of these disputes, even if/when one of them involves NBC and Comcast. We just want people to be able to watch football, without having to spend time or money figuring out a workaround.
The sad, simple reality is that the major corporations don’t really care about the consumers. They care about maximizing profits. About pumping up the stock price. About winning the periodic showdowns with other major corporations.
We may have to accept it. We don’t have to like it. And we absolutely don’t have to silently take it. If we do, it will morph from the exception into the norm.
So make yourself heard. Blame everyone involved. If they want to get this done in time to minimize the inconvenience and expense that the consumers will experience, they will. More accurately, they would have — before the consumers were deprived of the football games they wanted to watch on Saturday and Monday.
