On the evening of August 31, 2023, millions of viewers sat down to watch a competitive nationally televised opener to the college football season on ESPN, featuring defending Pac-12 champion Utah upsetting Florida.
To the surprise of many of Charter Communications' 14.7 million pay TV customers, a blackout of ESPN, along with ABC O&Os and 24 other Disney cable networks, would begin that evening, depriving them of access to the game ... and ultimately changing the way pay TV program licensing negotiations are handled.
It's definitely no coincidence, given the way these things are intentionally timed, but Disney is on a very similar football-disrupting path with DirecTV that very well could deprive around 11 million DirecTV viewers access to football-laden ESPN and ABC, as well as other Disney channels starting Sept. 1.
A source close the negotiation told me the primetime ESPN matchup on Saturday between No. 7 Notre Dame and 20th-ranked Texas A&M will finish before the negotiating deadline and will be unaffected.
But if hot blackout action does break out, Sunday's game between No. 13 LSU and 23rd-ranked USC, set to be simulcast on ESPN and ABC, wouldn't be available on DirecTV satellite, DirecTV Stream or U-Verse TV. (ESPN has a full rundown of the nearly 30 college games being presented on ESPN this weekend.)
And just like last year, when Charter customers were deprived of seeing Aaron Rodgers' ultimately short-lived debut as a New York Jet on Monday Night Football, DirecTV users could miss out on Rodgers return to the NFL field Monday night when the Jets take on the Super Bowl runner-up San Francisco 49ers.
The negotiations between DirecTV and Disney come after the latter's joint venture with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery, Venu Sports, was hit with a preliminary injunction. Virtual pay TV operator Fubo, with affidavit assistance from DirecTV, successfully argued that the JV is anti-competitive, because it gave itself flexible program distribution terms -- such as the ability to create genre-based bundles -- that pay TV operators have long sought and been rebuffed over.
In a declaration made last week, DirecTV programming chief Rob Thun said he'll be looking for those kind of flexible network licensing terms when he negotiates with each of the Venu partners over the next 12 months.
Disney’s president of platform distribution, Justin Connolly, told the Penske showbiz trades, “I think, or I know, that they are trying to spin and push this narrative that they want to explore more flexible, skinnier bundles, and that we refuse to engage on that, and bottom line: That is blatantly false, and we’ve been negotiating with them for weeks, and we proposed a variety of flexible options … but yet they haven’t engaged with us on the options."
