DirecTV subscribers lose access over sports-heavy weekend due to licensing dispute

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Millions of sports fans watching ESPN over the weekend suddenly saw their screens black out.

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

Yeah, DirecTV subscribers saw cable channels owned by Disney go off the air in the middle of the fourth-round matches of the U.S. Open, and it’s all because of a contract dispute between DirecTV and Disney, which owns ESPN, ABC and Disney+.

MARTIN: Here to tell us more about all this is Alex Weprin. He writes about media and sports for The Hollywood Reporter. Good morning, Alex.

ALEX WEPRIN: Good morning.

MARTIN: OK, screen going black in the middle of the match – OK, (laughter) not a way to win friends, but what is the snag here? What have Disney and DirecTV been negotiating about?

WEPRIN: So every few years, media companies like Disney and TV providers like DirecTV, they’ll kind of renegotiate their contracts just to keep their channels on the air. This time, however, thanks to cord-cutting, it’s a little more significant for both parties. Disney wants to try and get as much cash as possible, keep their channels as widely available as possible. DirecTV is trying to change how they sell TV. They want to start selling TV in genres like sports and news and kids. And so that’s kind of caused this dustup between the companies, and Disney’s channels are now dark.

MARTIN: Who is most affected by this outage? I mean, I can imagine where some people who are saying, well, OK, just switch to another streaming service. Is that possible?

WEPRIN: Well, I mean, some DirecTV subscribers will be able to. They have about 11 million, you know, between their streaming service and their satellite TV service. However, there are many DirecTV subscribers – in fact, the DirecTV over-indexes in this area – that live in rural America, that don’t have access to high-speed internet because the cable companies never built out infrastructure there. So while some subscribers would be able to switch – although, as anyone who’s tried to do so can tell you, it’s not exactly easy or simple – there are actually millions of DirecTV subscribers for whom it’s really difficult, and they may not have any other good options.

MARTIN: Do we have any sense of how these negotiations are going? I mean, it does seem kind of like a power move to, like, pull the programming off the air, like, in the middle of programming. But do we have any sense? And I know that’s a difficult question because obviously, by definition, negotiations take place…

WEPRIN: Yeah.

MARTIN: …Behind closed doors and so forth. But do we have any sense of it, like…

WEPRIN: Yeah.

MARTIN: …How soon these channels could be restored, anything like that?

WEPRIN: You know, typically if the companies are close at all, they will try to avoid a blackout. The fact that there is a blackout suggests that they are pretty far apart on key issues. I will say that the start of football season is in one week, and I think that will be kind of the impetus to get these two sides in a room to kind of start negotiating and cut a deal, because the NFL is the king of TV. And I think they both kind of want ESPN back in DirecTV homes before the NFL season.

MARTIN: It was just last year that Disney’s channels went dark during a dispute with the cable carrier Charter Spectrum. So does – what does this tell us about, you know, the power of a company like Disney?

WEPRIN: You know, I think it wasn’t that long ago that I think Disney would say they were operating from a position of strength, and DirecTV would’ve said the same thing. I actually think they’re both operating from a place of weakness right now. They’re both really impacted by cord-cutting. The dynamics of TV are changing dramatically. And I think the fact that we’re seeing more of these blackouts, like Charter last year and DirecTV this year, suggests that these companies are really finding the current moment existential. They’re trying to figure out how to survive in this new TV environment.

MARTIN: That’s Alex Weprin of The Hollywood Reporter. Alex, thanks so much for sharing this reporting and these insights with us.

WEPRIN: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF TIM SCHAUFERT’S “JOURNEY”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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