YouTube TV was unable to negotiate an eleventh-hour agreement with Disney to maintain over a dozen Disney-owned stations on the live TV streaming service.
This includes popular networks such as ESPN and ABC have been deleted from the service as of December 18th. As promised, YouTube TV’s membership has been reduced to $50 per month as a direct result of the lost material.
After continued discussions with YouTube TV, Disney stated in a statement late Friday that “they have declined to reach a fair contract with us based on market terms and conditions.”
“As a result, their subscribers have lost access to our unrivaled portfolio of networks including live sports and news plus kids, family and general entertainment programming from ABC, the ESPN networks, the Disney channels, Freeform, the FX networks and the National Geographic channels,” the company added. “We stand ready to reach an equitable agreement with Google as quickly as possible in order to minimize the inconvenience to YouTube TV viewers by restoring our networks. We hope Google will join us in that effort.”
Via The Verge
The statement comes after a message to subscribers earlier this week that the channels might be removed from YouTube TV on Friday, December 17th if a settlement is not made between the two businesses. If the discussions failed, YouTube TV stated that it will reduce its monthly fee from $65 to $15 to compensate for the shift.
Earlier this week, it appeared like a favorable resolution to the service outage was on the horizon. For instance, in an email to members on Monday, the service stated that the House of Mouse “is an essential partner for us,” adding that it intended to achieve an agreement with Disney “if we can obtain equal terms.” However, the firms were unable to strike an agreement since their present agreement expired on December 17th.
“We’ve held good faith negotiations with Disney for several months,” YouTube TV said. “Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we’ve been unable to reach an equitable agreement before our existing one expired, and their channels are no longer available on YouTube TV.”
YouTube TV wrote on a blog post
The full list of channels that left because a deal was not reached include the following:
- Your local ABC channel
- ABC News Live
- Disney Channel
- Disney Junior
- Disney XD
- Freeform
- FX
- FXX
- FXM
- National Geographic
- National Geographic Wild
- ESPN
- ESPN2
- ESPN3 (by authentication to the ESPN app)
- ESPNU
- ESPNEWS
- SEC Network
- ACC Network
Carriage conflicts are all too prevalent in our new streaming ecosystem, and they sometimes play out publicly before a settlement is found — as was recently the case with YouTube TV and NBCUniversal-owned channels. Less commonly, two companies fail to reach an agreement, and the consumer pays the price by having to search around for a new provider if they want to continue watching their preferred content.
