Credit: Inside The MagicThe battle between Disney and YouTube continues.
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The Walt Disney Company was denied its request to reactivate ABC channels by YouTube following the two companies’ ongoing battle involving a new carriage deal.
Late last week, Disney-owned channels went offline for millions of YouTube TV subscribers. Subscribers lost access to ESPN as well as a variety of ABC programs. Disney asked YouTube to reinstate its channels for Election Day coverage, though YouTube is not budging.
YouTube shared the following post on its official blog, stating Disney received the same statement in an email:
Thanks for your proposal.
We agree that the right priority here is to give customers what they want. As you know from the many content disputes you’ve been part of, customers don’t want companies fighting and content blackouts. But unfortunately, your proposal would permit us to return Disney’s ABC stations only for a day and will cause customer confusion among those who may briefly see ABC on YouTube TV only to lose it again shortly after.
There are plenty of other options for customers – election news information is very widely available across other broadcast stations and news networks on YouTube TV, as well as on the main YouTube service, for free. In fact, on the last two U.S. election days, the vast majority of tuned in YouTube TV subscribers chose not to watch ABC.
Publicly resorting to the same tactic that Disney relied on in past disputes fails to acknowledge the distinction between YouTube and other distribution platforms. As you know, Disney can continue to livestream news information on the ABC News YouTube page, which has 19.1M subscribers, and its ABC local stations can also do so on their YouTube pages.
To truly achieve what is best for our mutual customers, we propose immediately restoring the Disney channels that our customers watch: ABC and the ESPN networks, while we continue to negotiate. Those are the channels that people want.
If you agree with our proposal and give us approval, we can get our operational teams together and get these channels live in hours. Let us know how you’d like to proceed.
More importantly, let’s get a fair deal done so we can get back to providing our mutual customers with the content they want. Thank you.
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Disney executives claim YouTube TV’s parent company, Google, is not seeking a “fair deal.” However, a YouTube representative says Disney is being “unnecessarily aggressive.”
“There are aspects of their portfolio that are doing well on our platform, especially sports,” the executive said. “Disney has a very broad portfolio of channels where viewership on many networks is in decline or non-existent.”
YouTube is seeking an improved deal than the one Disney signed with Charter two years ago. This deal allowed Charter customers to get free Disney+, as well as ESPN+ and Hulu.
YouTube TV wants users to remain on the platform while accessing Disney channels and services.