Now the YouTube TV-Disney dispute is ready for its close-up: Millions of fans will not be able to watch tonight’s Monday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals on YouTube TV unless the impasse is resolved before kickoff.
Here’s the state of play (off the field): Google-owned YouTube TV is the nation’s fourth-largest TV distributor with 10 million subscribers. Tonight’s game is being simulcast on ESPN and ABC. And since midnight Friday, more than 20 Disney channels — including the family of ESPN networks — have been unavailable to subscribers because YouTube TV and Disney failed to resolve their carriage dispute.
Sure, those subscribers have options: They can sign up for yet another streaming service like Fubo or Hulu, shell out $30 per month for ESPN’s new direct-to-consumer service, watch on the local ABC affiliate if they have an antenna or phone a friend and make plans to watch at their house.
But this dispute underscores the obvious: It’s headache-inducing just to figure out how to watch a game these days.
“That’s the biggest change in this brave new world,” Ed Desser, the prominent sports media consultant and former longtime sports media executive with the NBA, told The Dallas Morning News on Monday.
“We went from when you had cable, you pretty much get everything, you didn’t have to think about it. That was the old world. And now, between the myriad of alternatives for live signals, plus the fact that now you can’t even get certain programming … There are a lot of different ways to watch the content, and it is not necessarily intuitive anymore. Discovery has just become a bigger and bigger challenge, and nobody has come up with a solution to that that makes it easy for fans, at least not yet.”
Lee Berke, the veteran sports media consultant and owner of LHB Sports, Entertainment and Media, echoed that sentiment, telling The News on Monday that “it’s increasingly complicated and complex because of all these technologies that are offering up the games. But you reach certain flashpoints, and this is one of them.”
Angst among fans has been bubbling on social media all weekend.
Disney had a triple-header of notable SEC football matchups this Saturday, all of which were unavailable on YouTube TV: Texas-Vanderbilt, Georgia-Florida and Oklahoma-Tennessee.
On Saturday, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey posted on social media that he had upgraded his streaming subscriptions to include ESPN’s direct-to-consumer offering. (The SEC’s media rights deal with Disney runs through 2034.)
“Problem solved,” Sankey wrote. “Plenty of options in this environment (saved a bit while making the change).”
A deal between YouTube TV and Disney will ultimately be reached, but when is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, consternation builds among YouTube TV subscribers, as an untold number weigh whether to sign up for yet another streaming service.
Unfortunately for viewers, this is nothing new. Earlier this football season, YouTube TV engaged in carriage disputes with FOX in August and NBC in September. Both were resolved.
“This is part of a well-worn process that seems to recur frequently and has been going on for years,” Desser said of the dispute. “The only real change is the amounts of money involved have now become sufficiently large and the strategic importance has grown to the point that the blackouts that were one time next to unthinkable now have become more common … So the stakes keep getting raised.”
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