Monday Night Football, the flagship program on Disney-owned ESPN, is losing millions of viewers over the Mouse’s insistence on fixed prices and bloated channel packages for DirecTV.
It has now been a full 10 days since The Walt Disney Company and DirecTV, one of the largest pay-TV providers in the United States, failed to come to an agreement on new terms for a carriage deal that would allow Disney content to be distributed. That’s the factual, dry way of putting it.
Another is that Disney and DirecTV are currently locked in a nationally publicized blame game in which each company is releasing fiery complaints about the other.
Disney is facing a federal complaint about bad faith practices, and both parties seem to have blocked their customers from viewing the Trump-Harris presidential debate on Disney-owned ABC News. If you ask either Disney or DirecTV, everything is all the other party’s fault, and if it were up to them, you’d be saving a ton of money right now.
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Somewhat ironically, Disney’s demand that DirecTV carry whatever it tells it to alongside ESPN in overstuffed cable packages is actually causing it to lose viewers of the sports channel by the million and the corresponding revenue.
According to Fortune, the season premiere of Monday Night Football saw a US TV audience of 20.5 million viewers; this is a 9.7% decrease from last season’s premiere, which is a pretty staggering drop. Unquestionably, this has to do a lot with not letting 11 million households across the country have access to ESPN.
DirecTV reportedly pays Disney approximately $20 billion annually to distribute the Mouse’s various channels, which is also a pretty huge chunk of money that the company is incrementally losing right now. Sure, Disney is one of the most powerful and wealthy companies in the world, but that doesn’t mean it can afford to lose billions on both streaming and pay TV.
As one might expect from the PR-obsessed Disney, the Mouse is trying to spin the Monday Night Football audience numbers as actually being great, totally awesome, thanks for asking, how are you? The company released a statement saying:
ESPN’s Monday Night Football 2024 season opener averaged 20.5 million viewers (ESPN, ABC, ESPN2, ESPN+, ESPN Deportes, and NFL+) for the San Francisco 49ers’ 32-19 win over the New York Jets (September 9, 8:15 p.m. ET). The audience is Monday Night Football‘s second-most-watched Week 1 matchup in ESPN’s 19 seasons airing the legendary television franchise (2006–present, 34 games).
This is the same kind of creative accounting that allows Disney to claim that “streaming” is actually making the company a nice profit, despite Disney+ and Hulu losing tens of millions of dollars; after all, if you add in ESPN+ revenue, doesn’t that just even things out?
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In this case, ESPN itself announced in January 2024 that Monday Night Football was breaking records with more than 25 million viewers, stating, “ESPN’s Monday Night Football delivered an audience higher than 25.6 million viewers for the second consecutive game and for the third game in the span of six weeks airing the Detroit Lions at Dallas Cowboys Monday Night Football Special Edition on Saturday, December 30.”
That means that the season premiere of this show lost five million viewers since then, regardless of what Disney says now.
No matter how much Disney wants to massage the numbers, its actions are causing the most popular sports program in the country to lose its audience. Maybe it should start rethinking its tactics.
Did you watch Monday Night Football this week?