Some months it seems YouTube just can’t win. Only a week after the announcement that YouTube had finally come to an agreement with Roku, and only a month after its dispute with NBCUniversal, we see Disney throw a glove into the arena. Blake & Wang P.A entertainment lawyer, Brandon Blake, breaks down the cause.
ABC, ESPN threatened
The dispute this time is over carriage fees. The deadline was set for last Friday, December 17th, and it wasn’t met. As of that weekend, both services had been removed from YouTube, although both parties stayed at the negotiating table and a deal was struck late on Sunday. It’s certainly got to be painful for YouTube, with the college football season heating up and a whole weekend of sport missed.
It appears the claim, at least on YouTube’s side, is that Disney is not playing fair with the rates it is charging. They want similar rates to other services of a similar size. We would be interested to know the full scope of this deal, given it was struck between two notable argumentative parties.
Whether this was mere posturing for leverage, or a genuine concern, is hard to tell. The amount of disputes we’ve seen head YouTube’s way of late does suggest that Google, its parent company, is trying to leverage something without much success to back it with. Not that they don’t have market share- they are speculated to be the most popular vMVPD offering Live TV currently, alongside Hulu. Both have about 4 million subscribers.
Disney, too, has made waves with threats to pull channels in the past, including with AT&T and Dish in 2019 and Altice in 2017.
Honoring the cost
As well as warning viewers of the impending channel loss, YouTube dropped its subscription prices by a hefty $15 to compensate for the lost channels. It has decided to honor that reduction for the month, allowing existing subscribers to keep the discount active for their next monthly bill.
Alongside the more complex debate with Roku, YouTube has also recently had a run-in with NBCUniversal over a similar carriage agreement. At that time, however, there was no blackout of services, as a timely deal was reached.
Carriage deal disputes have become a feature of the modern entertainment landscape as pay-TV operators continue to see their overall ecosystem decline and streaming boom. It’s natural to see such spats as the terms evolve, especially for companies that may have enjoyed unexpected added success from the streaming boom in the years since initial carriage agreements were signed- and the parties that wouldn’t mind taking advantage of pre-existing contracts as leverage. However, for a newer entrant into the space, YouTube TV does seem to have found itself in a number of these disputes of late.
Will this be the last YouTube TV Carriage dispute of the year, or is there more to come? Currently, the waters seem to be still, but there’s still a little time left, we guess. Brandon will be watching for future developments with interest.
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