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With ‘Monday Night Football’ 6 Days Away, Disney and DirecTV Are on the Clock

tony maglio
·4-min read

Are you ready for some football? Not you, DirecTV customers.

Disney channels have gone dark on the satellite-TV (and also not-satellite, now) provider after the two companies failed to come to terms on a new carriage agreement. The timing is particularly bad considering the NFL’s regular season kicks off this week and Disney is sitting on a strong “Monday Night Football” opener. DirecTV consumers are going to want that, arguably more than Disney is going to need DirecTV consumers.

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Six days from now, the New York Jets will visit the San Francisco 49ers in primetime. The game is set to air on both ABC and ESPN — two popular networks that DirecTV customers do not currently have access to (though if you’re willing to crawl on your roof, you can get ABC with an antenna).

Why? Primarily it’s because DirecTV customers do not want to also pay for Disney’s many unpopular cable channels. On the other side of the (presently vacant) negotiating table, Disney says DirecTV won’t pay what its entertainment is worth.

We’ve seen this show before — a lot. We see this practically every time a major carriage agreement expires; Paramount just went through this Charter, the cable giant that is no stranger to carriage battles and the blackouts that serve as their artillery. Linear TV is sinking, and everyone is trying to get the final seat on the lifeboat. We saw exactly this show almost exactly one year ago and, if history is any indicator, it will not end well for Aaron Rodgers.

Last September, it was Disney’s dispute with Charter that nearly made millions of Spectrum customers miss Rodgers’ highly-anticipated — and very short-lived — debut with the Jets. A deal, which cut Spectrum customers in on a Disney+ deal and cut eight Disney cable channels out of the mandatory bundle, was done mere hours before kick off. Who says Disney is out of magic?

Oh, Rob Thun just did.

“Disney is in the business of creating alternate realities, but this is the real world where we believe you earn your way and must answer for your own actions,” Thun, the chief content officer of DirecTV, said in a statement. “They want to continue to chase maximum profits and dominant control at the expense of consumers — making it harder for them to select the shows and sports they want at a reasonable price.”

“Consumer frustration is at an all-time high as Disney shifts its best producers, most innovative shows, top teams, conferences, and entire leagues to their direct-to-consumer services while making customers pay more than once for the same programming on multiple Disney platforms,” he continued. “Disney’s only magic is forcing prices to go up while simultaneously making its content disappear.”

Goodness, Rob: why don’t you tell us what you thought of “Ant-Man 3”?

Here’s the thing though: DirecTV is not Charter. It’s much smaller, and Disney knows it is in the power position. Disney got its rate increases in the Spectrum standoff — it was no one-sided victory. If Thun didn’t already know he was outmanned, he did after the Disney gang’s response statement.

Disney made it three against one with a joint statement from Disney Entertainment co-chairs Dana Walden and Alan Bergman, as well as ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro — basically everyone who is up for Bob Iger’s job.

Together they said: “DirecTV chose to deny millions of subscribers access to our content just as we head into the final week of the U.S. Open and gear up for college football and the opening of the NFL season. While we’re open to offering DirecTV flexibility and terms which we’ve extended to other distributors, we will not enter into an agreement that undervalues our portfolio of television channels and programs. We invest significantly to deliver the No. 1 brands in entertainment, news, and sports because that’s what our viewers expect and deserve. We urge DirecTV to do what’s in the best interest of their customers and finalize a deal that would immediately restore our programming.”

So who’s right and who’s wrong? As always, it’s a little bit of both. The white hat/black hat here doesn’t matter: DirecTV users just want their football in time to see white helmets crashing into gold helmets.

Both the Jets and 49ers are Super Bowl contenders. Some early prognosticators may even consider the September 9 game a Super Bowl LIX preview. The Niners have been to — and lost both of — two of the last five Super Bowls. The Jets know they have a small window here with an all-around very solid team and one of the best quarterbacks of all time. Hopefully this “Monday Night Football” open goes better for that guy than the last one.

Though Spectrum consumers got to watch their 2023 “MNF” opener in the nick of time, they didn’t get to see see much of Rodgers. On just the fourth offensive snap of the season, Rodgers tore his achilles. The Jets went 7-10 and Rodgers has only practiced since.

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