Just in time for the Monday Night Football opener — and with 15 million New Yorkers potentially waiting to find out if they could watch their Jets — Disney and Spectrum have settled their 11-day carriage dispute.
Disney and Charter Communications announced Monday the resolution of their dispute, restoring ESPN and other networks to Charter’s Spectrum cable.
The deal secures Disney about $2.2 billion in fees from Charter that had been jeopardized, while giving the communications company an entry into the streaming world that has encouraged millions of former cable customers to cut the cord.
Disney co-chairman Dana Walden praised the deal for what it did beyond the global sports leader.
“We need to continue to grow our streaming business, it’s currently a central point of our strategy,” says Walden.
Just in time for the Monday Night Football opener — and with 15 million New Yorkers potentially waiting to find out if they’ll be able to watch their Jets — Disney and Spectrum have settled their 11-day transportation dispute.
The deal allowed 15 million New Yorkers with Spectrum service to watch Aaron Rodgers’ abbreviated debut for the New York Jets on ABC and ESPN.
“And this deal gives us the ability to distribute Disney+ basic to Charter’s nine and a half million Select subscribers, which is great for us and allows us to grow our subscribers, our revenue, our advertising business, and it allows us also maintain our core channels on the linear entertainment side, which is important for generating revenue.
“We like the flexibility of this deal,” said Jimmy Pitaro, president of ESPN. “We love creativity.”
Disney had pulled its owned channels from the Charter-owned Spectrum TV system on August 31, including ESPN, ABC, National Geographic and FX.
It was during the US Open tennis tournament and the start of the first weekend of college football.
But “Monday Night Football,” which airs on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, is on a whole different level.
Besides Rodgers’ debut — which ended abruptly — Monday’s game involved the Jets and Buffalo Bills, two New York teams on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
“When passionate fans are deprived of something they want, you’re going to hear about it,” said John Fortunato, a communications professor at Fordham University who specializes in sports media.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul welcomed the deal and said her office would work to secure refunds for the estimated 1.5 million New York families who lost Disney resorts during the dispute.
Disney co-chairman Dana Walden praised the deal for what it did beyond the global sports leader.
Disney had already offered a price reduction on its services in response to the impasse
That’s the message Spectrum viewers saw on their TVs when trying to watch Disney-owned programming.
As part of the deal, the Disney+ and ESPN+ streaming services will be made available to Spectrum cable customers at no additional cost, something Disney had initially been reluctant to do.
Additionally, Charter customers will eventually receive the direct-to-consumer streaming service ESPN, which is in the works but does not have a launch date.
While making a direct-to-consumer product available through a cable system may seem counterintuitive, the deal will help the soon-to-be-launched ESPN service establish itself and have better access to advertisers, Pitaro said.
Charter had been making noises about dropping the cable business with ESPN altogether and had even informed its customers of other ways to access the network.
But this is an extremely risky decision. Essentially, the deal allows Charter and Disney to get their hands on both cable and streaming while we wait to see how these businesses evolve in the years to come.
Charter had also sought greater flexibility to end “bundling” or forcing cable customers to choose stations they don’t necessarily want.
Monday’s deal reduces the size of the Disney “bundle” from 27 to 19 networks, but still guarantees that Disney will be paid for a significant percentage of those stations.
Charter’s carriage fees to Disney – what it pays for access to their networks – are expected to increase, although financial terms were not released Monday.
Disney pulled ESPN, ABC and its other cable channels from Spectrum on September 1 due to a pricing dispute with Charter. Disney CEO Bob Iger is seen above
Disney+ subscribers worldwide in the first three quarters of this year. The ability for Spectrum customers to access the service is seen as a boon for the deal.
“On the surface, the terms of the deal that were made public suggest that Disney could not afford to let the dispute simmer, and Charter may have been bluffing when it said it was willing to walk away from the deal. cable TV industry,” Paul Verna said. , senior analyst at Insider Intelligence.
The deal leaves many unanswered questions, including how much more consumers will have to pay for these different services, he said.
“In addition to these unknowns, broader issues around the viability of the traditional pay TV package and challenges related to monetization of streaming media will continue to haunt the industry as it navigates the transition from linear to digital “,
Verna said: “Further distribution conflicts are inevitable, and they will once again raise these unresolved questions for media owners and distributors. »
