YouTube TV Blackout, Disney’s Longest Ever, Is About To Wipe Away More Football

Talks are continuing between the two companies, but there are few signs of an imminent breakthrough. Reports in The Athletic and other outlets (including Deadline) in recent days suggested a resolution was possibly near at hand. Surely, the thinking from informed sources went, the companies couldn’t extend the impasse and keep 10 million subscribers out in the cold in the middle of football season.

And yet … here we are.

ABC stations and networks like ESPN and FX went dark on October 30. After an initial flurry of barbed statements and rebuttals, the two companies have settled into a less-vocal posture. Disney, though, did use its quarterly earnings release Thursday to send a clear signal that it was not about to capitulate.

Asked about the carriage fight during a CNBC appearance, CFO Hugh Johnston said, “We’re ready to go as long as they want to.” CEO Bob Iger then volunteered his take at the end of a conference call with Wall Street analysts. The company has been “working tirelessly to close this deal and restore our channels” to YouTube TV, he said, but it is also trying to ensure that a deal “reflects the value that we deliver.”

Saturday’s slate of college games, the third to be wiped away by the dispute, is loaded. Notre Dame meets Pittsburgh in a clash of Top 25 schools. No. 3 Texas A&M hosts South Carolina, while Texas-Georgia and Alabama-Oklahoma are also matchups of ranked teams. Monday Night Football features the Cowboys against the Las Vegas Raiders.

After Monday, there are big draws on ABC like Dancing With the Stars, though the show streams live on Disney+. Shark Tank is a notable Wednesday performer for ABC, and Jeopardy! has a loyal following on ABC-owned stations. Both shows, though, stream on Hulu (and Jeopardy! on Peacock as well).

Complicating the current standoff, as Deadline has documented, is the fact that Disney is not only haggling over price but as the owner of two meaningful distribution platforms that frustrated YouTube TV customers could switch to: Fubo and the new ESPN app. The former came under Disney control last month as part of the settlement over the ill-fated Venu Sports joint venture, and the latter was launched by Disney in August with more than a dozen ESPN linear networks available without a pay-TV subscription.

Those assets, which didn’t exist when Disney battled DirecTV or Charter before that, help Disney’s leverage but an estimate this week by Morgan Stanley pegs weekly losses by the programmer at $30 million. YouTube TV, meanwhile, is a tiny barnacle on the hull of the Google battleship. Presumably, the tech giant can withstand a lot of financial pain without flinching, though it is likely already incurring substantial subscriber losses.

In an appearance Thursday on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast, former ESPN president John Skipper said he never experienced a blackout during his run atop the network, though friction with pay-TV operators was a constant. He predicted the dispute would be resolved by Thanksgiving week at the latest. “You don’t want to go into the Thanksgiving period, which is awash in football, college and professional, without the service,” he said. “I think they’ll get it done.”

Ex-Miami Marlins president David Samson, who appears with Skipper regularly on the podcast for an edition called “The Sporting Class,” was much more pessimistic. He pointed to the federal government shutdown, whose resolution was hastened by the threat of Thanksgiving travel being disrupted by airport slowdowns due to unpaid air-traffic controllers. Monday Night Football, in Samson’s view, is not equivalent to the Thanksgiving travel factor in the carriage situation. “I don’t think we’ve come to the edge of the cliff yet,” he said.