DirecTV Calls Disney ‘An Obstacle to the Solution’ as ABC, ESPN Carriage Blackout Continues

DirecTV won’t let the pressure of Monday Night Football, or the upcoming presidential debate on ABC, keep them from fighting Disney for a fair carriage deal for its lineup of linear networks.

CFO Ray Carpenter told investors on Tuesday that the media conglomerate “is the first major programmer to take such an aggressive posture” to preserve its “multi-channel fat bundles” in discussions with the distributor, becoming an “obstacle to the solution” in creating a better model for TV distribution that benefits customers moving forward.

“We’re prepared to take this as long as it needs to for us to get what is most important for us,” Carpenter said, noting that the company is not playing a “short-term game” in terms of resolving the dispute that resulted in a channel blackout impacting 11 million DirecTV customers as of Sunday.

He added that the company’s goal in negotiations with Disney is to emphasize flexibility in packaging over traditional rates and terms.

The company is pushing for channel packages to be “whittled down” from mega bundles carrying all Disney channels and sports programming, into genre-based offerings that tailor to customers’ viewing habits, including news, family and sports channels, so they don’t have to pay for offerings they don’t use. The programmers’ strategy to move content investment from linear networks to streaming offerings also impacts the quality of programming available in the linear networks, lowering their value for customers.

“This is not the kind of dispute where we’re haggling over percentage points on a rate. This is really about changing the model in a way that gives everyone confidence that this industry can survive,” Carpenter said.

The blackout, which kicked off just moments before the USC vs. LSU college football game was set to air in Sunday primetime, comes ahead of a busy month for the House of Mouse, including the start of the college football and NFL seasons on ESPN and the telecasts of the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, as well as the 2024 Emmys on ABC.

“We were asking to keep the signal up, and that’s usually the case when we run into these situations. Unfortunately, Disney was not willing to entertain that. In fact, the timing of when they decided to pull the content was absolutely orchestrated to put the most pain and disruption on our customers,” Carpenter said.

In a statement Sunday, Disney Entertainment co-chairs Dana Walden and Alan Bergman and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro fired back at DirecTV, arguing that the pay TV giant “chose to deny millions of subscribers access to our content just as we head into the final week of the U.S. Open and gear up for college football and the opening of the NFL season.”

“While we’re open to offering DirecTV flexibility and terms which we’ve extended to other distributors, we will not enter into an agreement that undervalues our portfolio of television channels and programs,” the executives added. “We invest significantly to deliver the No. 1 brands in entertainment, news and sports because that’s what our viewers expect and deserve. We urge DirecTV to do what’s in the best interest of their customers and finalize a deal that would immediately restore our programming.”

Disney’s latest distributor faceoff comes after a dispute with Charter last year ended with an agreement that removed outlets like Freeform from the cable provider’s services.

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