Fans of sports and other Disney offerings are going to have to do without on one of the nation’s largest cable providers.
Disney pulled its programming from Charter Spectrum on Thursday night, even as the Disney-owned ESPN networks were covering major live sporting events such as the US Open and college football.
Amid a broken “video ecosystem,” Charter Communications said, “Disney — so far — has insisted on a traditional long-term deal with higher rates and limited packaging flexibility,” in a presentation provided before an investor webcast. “Disney declined our proposal and pulled its video channels from Charter’s video customers on August 31,” it added.
Thursday night’s blackout on Spectrum came minutes before the kickoff of a highly anticipated college football game between the Utah Utes and Florida Gators on ESPN and during Spanish phenomenon Carlos Alcaraz’s tennis match at the U.S. Open in New York on ESPN2.
Sports fans around the country were furious. Local Spectrum subscribers who watch ABC broadcasts of “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune” and KABC-TV Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” also were out of luck. The channels went dark shortly before the start of the NFL regular season, consistently the most watched programming on TV. Other channels that are part of the outage include FX, Freeform, Disney Channel and National Geographic.
Charter Spectrum is the major carrier in New York and Los Angeles, among numerous other cities, including Montgomery and surrounding areas.
ESPN was carrying a college football game between Florida and No. 14 Utah while ESPN2 was showing the U.S. Open tennis tournament when the channels went dark for Charter Spectrum’s 14.7 million subscribers.
This seemed to be the sticking point as Charter said it accepted Disney’s request for higher fees, although Charter executives didn’t provide specifics on the negotiations as they remain hopeful to get a deal done.
Iger did note that ESPN is in a different bucket and Disney was instead open to selling a stake in the network while also moving toward a direct-to-consumer streaming service of its live feed.
Still, ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro said at a CNBC event this summer that while this is the future for ESPN, it wouldn’t be in a way that would leave pay-TV distributors behind and nix the traditional pay-TV model that has supported the business for so long.
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