{"id":353971,"date":"2025-11-04T02:23:22","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T02:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/353971\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T02:23:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T02:23:22","slug":"disney-asks-youtube-tv-to-restore-abc-for-election-day-as-carriage-talks-continue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/353971\/","title":{"rendered":"Disney Asks YouTube TV To Restore ABC For Election Day As Carriage Talks Continue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tUPDATED with YouTube TV<\/a> statement.<\/strong> YouTube TV has rejected Disney<\/a>\u2018s request to restore ABC<\/a> for Election Day on Tuesday as a matter of \u201cpublic interest\u201d while the companies hammer out a carriage renewal.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe agree that the right priority here is to give customers what they want,\u201d YouTube TV acknowledged in a blog post<\/a>. \u201cAs you know from the many content disputes you\u2019ve been part of, customers don\u2019t want companies fighting and content blackouts. But unfortunately, your proposal would permit us to return Disney\u2019s ABC stations only for a day and will cause customer confusion among those who may briefly see ABC on YouTube TV only to lose it again shortly after.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tABC, ESPN and other Disney networks went dark Thursday night <\/a>for YouTube TV\u2019s 10 million subscribers after the distribution talks failed to yield a deal. Thus far, sports has been the primary casualty of the impasse, with a full slate of college football MIA last Saturday and the Monday Night Football game between the perennially high-rated Dallas Cowboys and the Arizona Cardinals next to be hit by the battle.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe blog post noted that ABC News has 19.1 million subscribers on YouTube, where news programming has been livestreamed during the carriage dispute<\/a>. ABC News Live, a 24\/7 channel, also can be accessed on Hulu, outside of the pay-TV<\/a> bundle.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere are plenty of other options for customers \u2013 election news information is very widely available across other broadcast stations and news networks on YouTube TV, as well as on the main YouTube service, for free. In fact, on the last two U.S. election days, the vast majority of tuned in YouTube TV subscribers chose not to watch ABC,\u201d YouTube TV\u2019s blog post maintained.<\/p>\n

\n\tA Disney statement provided to Deadline earlier Monday explained the context for the company\u2019s request. \u201cDespite the impasse that led to the current blackout, we have asked YouTube TV to restore ABC for Election Day so subscribers have access to the information they rely on,\u201d the statement from a Disney spokesperson said. \u201cWe believe in putting the public interest first and hope YouTube TV will take this small step for their customers while we continue to work toward a fair agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYouTube TV, which launched in 2017, has grown into a dominant pay-TV provider with 10 million subscribers. Given its growing scale, the operator has had a string of high-profile carriage battles with major programmers. TelevisaUnivision\u2019s networks have been dark since late-September, but NBCUniversal, Fox Corp. and Paramount all reached agreements without blackouts.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor its part, Disney has been willing to risk blackouts at times in order to further its strategic objectives as it balances declining linear tune-in with its direct-to-consumer streaming operations. In 2023 and 2024, it had high-profile blackouts with Charter Communications\u2019 Spectrum systems and DirecTV, respectively. The DirecTV outage coincided with a debate between then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris. DirecTV rejected Disney\u2019s request<\/a> to restore ABC temporarily in that situation.<\/p>\n

\n\tUnlike sports, broadcast network news programming is fairly widely available outside of the traditional linear bundle. Disney several years ago started putting ABC World News Tonight and other news programming on Hulu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UPDATED with YouTube TV statement. YouTube TV has rejected Disney\u2018s request to restore ABC for Election Day on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":353972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8811,64,134476,7299,94168,67,132,68,100250],"class_list":{"0":"post-353971","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-abc","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-carriage-dispute","11":"tag-disney","12":"tag-pay-tv","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us","16":"tag-youtube-tv"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115489053282723772","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}