If YouTube TV and Disney don’t come to an agreement today, you will lose ABC, Disney, and ESPN channels at midnight tonight. The carriage deal between YouTube TV and Disney is set to expire tonight at midnight, and that is when those channels will be removed from your service. However, the good news here is that YouTube TV will decrease your monthly price to $49.99 (that’s $15 off) until Disney channels are brought back to the service. If a deal is not reached, you will lose quite a few channels. These include: 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, and the SEC Network. That’s 17 networks, which will be a big hit to YouTube TV’s 85+ channels.
What is going on?
YouTube TV, just like any other carrier of Live TV channels, has to make agreements with those that run and own those networks (in this case, Disney). It’s known as a carriage agreement. Now we don’t know the details of these agreements, but we do know that YouTube TV asks for the same contract as competitors that are similar in size. These carriage disputes happen quite often, though it has happened with YouTube TV a lot more recently than with their competitors. It is more than likely that YouTube TV and Disney will come to an agreement, at the very last minute. This happens a lot with Live TV operators and distributors. Or we may see these channels disappear for a few days and then come back online sometime next week. YouTube TV has likely lost a solid chunk of customers this year. After having disputes with Roku, NBCUniversal and now Disney. The Roku dispute wasn’t a huge deal, and that ended up getting resolved a couple weeks ago. But the NBCUniversal dispute was a big deal, as it would have resulted in losing a ton of channels too. Fingers crossed that YouTube TV is able to get a deal worked out sooner rather than later.
