Amid the carriage dispute between Disney and DirecTV, the entertainment giant called the channel distributor out for misrepresenting the companies’ ongoing negotiations.
“DirecTV continues to misrepresent the facts around our ongoing negotiations,” Disney Entertainment co-chairs Dana Walden and Alan Bergman and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said in a Wednesday statement. “Our priority is to reach a marketplace deal that serves the needs of DirecTV and their customers while also recognizing the value of our top-quality content and the significant investment required to create and acquire it.”
With more than 11 million subscribers losing access to Disney-owned linear networks ABC and ESPN since Sunday, Disney’s top bosses expressed their belief that there is still “a path to a fair and flexible agreement that strikes this critical balance and works for all sides, especially the consumer.”
Disney’s statement serves as a response to DirecTV CFO Ray Carpenter’s statements from Tuesday, in which he called Disney an “obstacle to the solution” in the negotiations, saying they are “the first major programmer to take such an aggressive posture” to preserve its “multi-channel fat bundles.”
Instead of preserving bundles that might leave viewers with offerings they won’t use, DirecTV is pushing for channel packages to be “whittled down” from mega bundles to genre-based offerings tailored to customers’ viewing habits. That might include bundling things together, such as news, family and sports channels.
“This is not the kind of dispute where we’re haggling over percentage points on a rate. This is really about changing the model in a way that gives everyone confidence that this industry can survive,” Carpenter said, noting that the company is not playing a “short-term game.” “We’re prepared to take this as long as it needs to for us to get what is most important for us.”
The carriage dispute prompted a blackout on ABC and ESPN for DirecTV subscribers, which went into effect just before USC vs. LSU college football game began airing in Sunday primetime. Subscribers similarly were unable to watch Monday night’s finale of “The Bachelorette” on ABC, and, should the blackout continue, won’t be able to watch season kickoffs for college football and the NFL on ESPN, telecasts of the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump nor the 2024 Emmys.
Leave a Reply