A contract dispute between Disney (DIS) and DirecTV still has not reached a conclusion after the media giant pulled its owned and operated channels, including ESPN and ABC, off DirecTV last week.
The media blackout has already affected the start of the NFL season, including the first Monday Night Football game, in addition to college football.
Along with ESPN, other Disney Entertainment channels affected include the Disney Channel, Freeform, National Geographic, and local news stations on the ABC network, which is set to host the first presidential debate Tuesday night between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
The crux of the issue? DirecTV doesn’t want to carry (and pay for) all of those channels. It wants a “skinnier” bundle, something the media companies themselves have begun to experiment with amid steep declines in linear television viewership as more subscribers cut the cord and opt for streaming services.
“Everybody loses,” Needham analyst Laura Martin told Yahoo Finance’s Morning Brief on Tuesday. “Content and distribution are complimentary networks. They both win together, and they both lose together. But this is inevitable because Disney keeps wanting to raise prices.”
“DirecTV wants to pay less [because] it has negative margins in the cable business. So these kinds of disputes are going to become more and more common.”
The dispute is similar to last year’s media blackout between Disney and broadband provider Charter Communications (CHTR), which fought to include more of Disney’s streaming options into its bundled offerings.
The two sides eventually reached an agreement in which Charter would offer some Disney streaming services — the ad-supported version of Disney+, ESPN+, and ESPN’s yet-to-be-launched direct-to-consumer offering — as part of select cable packages at no additional cost to the consumer.
But it’s a different set of negotiating chips this time around.
“What makes it different is DirecTV does not have a broadband distribution business that they can somehow align this with,” Macquarie analyst Tim Nollen told Yahoo Finance in an interview on Monday. “They’re dependent entirely on the pay TV ecosystem, and Disney is playing hardball with them because they can.”
In other words, DirecTV, which boasts over 11 million subscribers, can’t offer streaming packages as part of its bundles. That makes the satellite cable provider less powerful in its negotiations with Disney.
“Charter could come up with cross-selling options across broadband packages,” Nollen explained. “They could put together this combination of linear channels with streaming for their paid TV subscribers, whereas DirecTV is the satellite provider.”
“They don’t have the same flexibility in terms of how to get the content to consumers across a broadband connection. Without that, I think DirecTV is more limited in what they can offer.”
