Disney chief financial officer Hugh Johnston says the media giant is ready to go as long as YouTube TV wants to as the two sides remain locked in a carriage dispute that has hit the two-week mark.
“We’re in the middle of negotiations right now. Things are live. They’re happening. Obviously, as we entered the year, we knew this was going to be a challenging battle and we prepared ourselves for it, and we’re ready to go as long as they want to,”Johnston told CNBC on Thursday as the company reported earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter of 2025.
During the interview, Johnston pushed back on the idea that Google-owned platform may have more leverage in the fight.
“This is ultimately about your customers, and, right now, YouTube customers are suffering without this critical content for them, right? Sports in the middle of football season is about as important as you can get,” Johnston said. “So, I think from that perspective, we perhaps have some leverage as well, because there are other places people can go to get that sports.”
He also declined to address the outstanding issues that the two sides remain apart on.
“I’m just not going to comment on the various elements of the negotiation,” he said. “It’s a negotiation. There’s back and forth. They want certain things, you want certain things.”
When asked how the YouTube TV dispute would impact Disney’s earnings guidance, Johnston told analysts on the company’s earnings call that it “built a hedge into that with the expectation that these discussions could go for a little while.”
“In terms of the dollar impacts, keep in mind, there’s two pieces to it. There’s the piece that we’re not getting paid for and then the piece that we’re picking up by virtue of subscribers moving elsewhere,” he added. “But beyond that, I don’t want to comment because it is a live negotiation right now.”
The programming blackout between Disney and YouTube TV first began on Oct. 30. Disney has accused YouTube TV of insisting on receiving “preferential terms that are below market” and making “few concessions.”
“We care deeply about our consumers and our priority has always been to remain on their service without interruption, to close a deal on a timely basis so that interruption does not occur. The deal that we have proposed is equal to or better than what other large distributors have already agreed to,” Disney CEO Bob Iger told analysts on the fourth quarter earnings call. “
“While we’ve been working tirelessly to close this deal and restore our channels to the platform, it’s also imperative that we make sure that we agree to a deal that reflects the value that we deliver, which both YouTube, by the way, and Alphabet, have told us, is greater than the value of any other provider,” Iger continued. “So we’re not trying to break new ground.”
Meanwhile, YouTube TV argues that Disney is asking them for a rate above what Charter and DirecTV pay for the ABC networks and to pay more for their content than what they charge the Hulu and Fubo, which recently completed its merger with Hulu + Live TV.
It added that it isn’t asking for better rates, but for size-based “most favored nations,” a contractual promise that a programmer will not offer better terms to any other distributor without offering the same terms them. It also disputed that the tailored programming packages are Disney’s proposal, noting that it’s a topic they’ve had conversations with all of their partners about.
The latest carriage dispute comes after Disney resolved a 13-day programming blackout with DirecTV in September 2024, a 10-day dispute with Charter Communications in 2023 and a 48-hour dispute with Dish in 2022, while YouTube TV recently reached agreements with Fox and NBCUniversal.
In addition to Disney, YouTube TV has yet to reach a deal with TelevisaUnivision, whose programming has been dark on the platform since Sept. 30. President Donald Trump weighed in on the latter dispute, urging YouTube TV to restore the Spanish-language network’s programming.
With over 8 million subscribers, YouTube TV is one of the largest pay TV operators alongside Charter Communications, Comcast and DirecTV. It is the largest virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD), followed by Hulu + Live TV and Fubo, which combined total nearly 6 million subscribers in North America.
