Disney and Charter reach agreement to end ESPN, ABC blackout
Cable giant Charter Communications and Disney reached an agreement ending a blackout of ESPN for millions of pay-TV customers, hours before the sports network’s first broadcast of the new NFL season’s Monday Night Football.
Financial terms weren’t immediately known, but the companies said Monday that Charter won rights to include the ad-supported Disney+ and ESPN+ streaming services in its pay-TV packages.
Charter, which sells pay-TV service under the Spectrum brand, also gets the streamed version of the flagship ESPN network when that service launches in the future.
The agreement will restore popular Disney channels including ABC and FX to Charter’s 14.7 million customers after more than a week of blackouts.
The channels had been off the air as a result of a fee dispute between the companies and threatened to black out Monday’s night’s NFL game between the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills in major markets including New York and Los Angeles.
Disney had been pressing for an increase in the amount Charter pays to carry its channels.
Charter, the No. 2 U.S. cable provider, wanted more freedom to offer tailored pay-TV packages, including more bundles without ESPN, and wanted to include Disney streaming services like Disney+ and ESPN+ free.
Under the deal, Spectrum TV will provide its customers a narrower lineup of 19 networks from Disney.
The service will continue to carry ABC, the Disney Channel, FX and the Nat Geo Channel, in addition to the full suite of ESPN networks.
It will no longer offer Baby TV, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Freeform, FXM, FXX, Nat Geo Wild and Nat Geo Mundo, the companies said.
As part of the agreement, Charter will also market Disney streaming services to its broadband only customers.
The narrowing of Disney’s lineup on Charter cable systems creates an uncertain future for a number of channels that had cost the entertainment giant dearly over the years.
FXM, FXX, Nat Geo Wild and Nat Geo Mundo were part of Disney’s $71 billion takeover of Fox entertainment assets in 2019.
The company acquired Freeform, previously known as ABC Family, for $5.3 billion from Fox’s predecessor company in 2001.
Disney pulled its channels, including ABC and Nat Geo, off the Charter systems late last month after the two sides failed to reach a new distribution agreement.
The dispute meant many Charter customers couldn’t watch the U.S. Open tennis tournament or college football as the new season began.
Channels went dark in the middle of a U.S. Open match between Lloyd Harris and Carlos Alcaraz, the Spanish tennis star who went on to reach the semifinals.
The finals weren’t available to Charter customers.
The fight amounted to a showdown over the future of pay-TV between the world’s largest entertainment company and the largest U.S. cable TV provider behind Comcast.
Pay-TV distributors have been losing subscribers to a new generation of streaming services, many of them operated by the same companies that operate cable channels.
Charter Chief Executive Officer Chris Winfrey argued that the media companies have been encouraging customers to switch by putting some of their best programming on their streaming services and the industry should instead work together to offer a combined cable-streaming offering.