Disney and Charter have decided to let ESPN sports take the field on traditional cable after all.
The two media giants, battling for the past week over a renewal for carriage of Disney’s various cable networks on Charter’s major-market cable systems, have come to new terms, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal puts Disney networks like ESPN, ABC and Freeform back on Charter’s cable service. But their squabble, even though now settled, has the potential to echo in the media sector for months to come as distributors push back on major programmers like Disney that are increasingly putting more of their best content on stand-alone streaming services.
Disney and Charter declined to provide immediate official comment.
Charter and Disney, one of the nation’s biggest cable providers and one of the nation’s most popular content companies, came to an impasse earlier this month, with Disney pulling ESPN, ABC, and other big TV networks from Charter’s systems on the cusp of the start of both the NFL and college-football seasons. Charter’s systems include some that serve New York City and Los Angeles, two of the biggest media markets in the country. Charter’s Spectrum cable service has just under 15 million subscribers.
Carriage disputes have become increasingly common in the media industry, as programmers and distributors seek to keep revenue from linear TV flowing as customers jump to digital venues for their news, sports and entertainment. But this one raised eyebrows. Charter said it could no longer agree to pay higher rates for the same set of Disney cable networks when the company was losing video subscribers in droves. Charters said nearly 25 million customers, or 25% of the base of multichannel video programming distributors, have canceled their subscriptions over the last five years, and said it felt a rate hike for Disney would require that its basic cable subscribers gaining access to Disney+ at no extra charge, a request that made Disney executives balk.
More to come….