If you thought being stuck in a carriage dispute was bad, try being locked into two contracts at once.

That’s where YouTube TV subscribers who bought NFL Sunday Ticket find themselves after Disney pulled ESPN, ABC, and its entire channel portfolio at midnight Thursday. They’re no longer just dealing with a blackout during Week 9 of the NFL season. They’re realizing they can’t escape even if they wanted to, not without forfeiting the Sunday Ticket subscription they already paid up to $378 for.

If you bought Sunday Ticket as a YouTube TV add-on to save $102 off the standalone price, your access is chained to that base subscription. Cancel that $82.99-a-month service and your Sunday Ticket access disappears, even if you paid for the full season upfront and still have nine weeks of games left.

That policy matters a lot more this week than it did when people signed up in September. YouTube TV subscribers woke up Friday morning to find ESPN, ABC, and 16 other Disney channels gone from their lineup, which means no college football this weekend, no NBA, no NHL, and no Monday Night Football for the foreseeable future.

And because the bundled Sunday Ticket requires an active YouTube TV base plan, these subscribers can’t just switch to Hulu + Live TV or FuboTV without eating the entire Sunday Ticket fee. They’re stuck paying $82.99 a month for a service that just lost massive amounts of sports content, or they’re out hundreds of dollars on Sunday Ticket with zero recourse.

YouTube TV says it’ll offer a $20 credit if Disney’s channels remain dark for “an extended period.” That’s nowhere close to covering the cost of maintaining the base plan just to keep Sunday Ticket alive. Over a five-month NFL season (September through January), that’s roughly $415 in base plan fees on top of the $378 Sunday Ticket add-on.

Here’s the thing: you can buy Sunday Ticket standalone through YouTube Primetime Channels without needing YouTube TV at all. It costs $480 for returning subscribers, which is $102 more than the bundled version. But if you’re only keeping YouTube TV for sports, that $102 “discount” is a trap. You’re paying $415 over five months to access a $378 add-on, when you could’ve paid $480 once and been done with it. The bundled math only works if you actually want YouTube TV regardless of Sunday Ticket.

The problem is that plenty of subscribers took the bundled discount without fully understanding what happens if they want out. Google paid $2 billion annually for Sunday Ticket rights, and tying the cheaper version to a mandatory base plan subscription guarantees steady monthly revenue beyond the one-time seasonal fee. Now those subscribers are learning what that choice actually costs when a carriage agreement blows up mid-season.

And carriage disputes are becoming standard operating procedure. YouTube TV has clashed with NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount, TelevisaUnivision, and now Disney just in 2025 alone. Most were resolved before blackouts occurred. Disney didn’t. That leaves 10 million subscribers — with a significant chunk coming from Sunday Ticket signups — paying full price for a service missing critical sports content.

For Sunday Ticket subscribers, this means they’re trapped in corporate warfare with no exit strategy. They can’t switch to competing services without abandoning their Sunday Ticket investment. They can’t pause YouTube TV to save money during the blackout without losing access to Sunday Ticket. Their only option is to keep paying and hope the dispute resolves before too many games slip by.

This is streaming sports now. Carriage disputes used to be occasional irritants that resolved before major events. Now they’re strategic weapons in platform wars, with subscribers treated as acceptable losses.

YouTube TV didn’t invent the hostage situation. Cable companies have been running this play for decades, using sports to trap subscribers into paying for channels they don’t want. But YouTube TV made it worse by adding a second layer of captivity. You’re not just stuck with the base plan because you need sports. You’re stuck with the base plan because you already paid for Sunday Ticket, and cutting loose would mean eating hundreds of dollars in sunk costs.

The irony is that cord-cutters fled to streaming specifically to avoid this.

For Sunday Ticket subscribers stuck in the ESPN-YouTube TV blackout, there are no good options. They can keep paying for diminished service, cancel and forfeit hundreds of dollars, or wait it out and hope Disney and Google reach terms before more games disappear. None of those are acceptable, and that’s the point — when you’re a hostage, acceptable options don’t exist.