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ESPN has gone off the air on the major carriers for the second straight year during the US Open tennis tournament and in the middle of the first full weekend of college football.
The Disney Entertainment Channel went dark on DirecTV Sunday night after the parties were unable to reach a new carriage agreement.
The move angered some sports fans, who took to social media to express their displeasure. And the U.S. Tennis Association isn’t happy with another carriage dispute.
ESPN is showing the fourth round of the US Open when it airs on DirecTV at 7:20 pm EDT.
Half an hour before the start of the match between Frances Tiafoe, the American who reached the semi-finals of the 2022 US Open, and Alexei Popyrin, the Australian who knocked out defending champion Novak Djokovic on Friday.
“It is disappointing that fans and viewers across the country will not have the opportunity to watch the greatest athletes in our sport participate in the 2024 US Open due to the unfinished negotiations between DirecTV and Disney, which resulted in the loss of access to ESPN. We hope that This dispute can be resolved as soon as possible,” the USTA said in a statement.
It also happened 10 minutes before the start of the college football game between No. 13 LSU and 23rd ranked Southern California in Las Vegas.
an ABC-owned station in Los Angeles; San Francisco Bay Area; Fresno, California; New York; Chicago; Philadelphia; Houston; and Raleigh, North Carolina, also left DirecTV.
Last year, Disney and Spectrum — the nation’s second-largest cable TV provider — were engaged in a nearly 12-day impasse over an hourly agreement before the first Monday night NFL game of the season.
DirecTV said Disney offered an extension to keep the channel on the air in exchange for DirecTV having to drop all future lawsuits if its behavior was anti-competitive.
“Walt Disney Co. has once again abdicated its responsibility to consumers, its distribution partners, and now the American justice system,” Rob Thun, DirecTV’s chief content officer, said in a statement. “Disney is in the business of creating an alternative reality, but this is the real world where we believe you get your way and have to answer for your own actions. They want to continue to strive for maximum profits and dominant control at the expense of consumers – making it harder to choose the shows and sports they want at a reasonable price.
DirecTV has 11.3 million subscribers, according to Leichtman Research Group, making it the third largest pay TV provider in the country.
Dana Walden and Alan Bergman, co-chairmen of Disney Entertainment, and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro issued a joint statement urging DirecTV to complete the deal.
The statement added that “while we are open to offering DirecTV’s enhanced flexibility and terms to other distributors, we will not enter into an agreement that undermines our portfolio of channels and television programming. We are investing significantly in delivering the No. 1 brand in entertainment, news and sports because that’s what the audience wants and deserves.
The impasse comes as networks and distributors continue to disagree over content. Distributors and customers want to see a model where they can buy channels a la carte instead of subscribing to a bundling package.
Distributors are also frustrated with production companies putting some premium programs on direct-to-consumer platforms before they appear on channels. DirecTV mentioned the “Shogun” miniseries that appeared on Hulu before FX.
“Consumer frustration is at its peak because Disney changes the best producers, the most innovative shows, top teams, conferences, and entire leagues to direct-to-consumer services while making customers pay more than once for the same program on multiple Disney platforms,” he said. Thu. “The magic of Disney only forces the price up when the content is gone.”
In addition to all ESPN network channels and ABC-owned stations, Disney-branded channels Freeform, FX and National Geographic went dark on DirecTV.
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AP sports: https://apnews.com/hub/sports
