On Friday night, Disney-owned channels including ABC and ESPN were pulled from YouTube TV after Disney and YouTube parent Google were unable to reach a new carriage agreement.
In a statement, YouTube said: “We’ve held good faith negotiations with Disney for several months. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we’ve been unable to reach an equitable agreement before our existing one expired, and their channels are no longer available on YouTube TV. We will be decreasing our monthly price by $15, from $64.99 to $49.99 while this content remains off of our platform.”
“We know this is frustrating news for our customers, and not what we wanted. We will continue conversations with Disney to advocate on your behalf in hopes of restoring their content on YouTube TV. In the meantime, we’ll update this website soon with the latest updates, including channels impacted, alternative ways to continue enjoying some of Disney’s content on The Disney Bundle, information about our price decrease, plus any other questions you may have about this situation,” the statement continued.
“We’ve been in ongoing negotiations with Google’s YouTube TV and unfortunately, they have declined to reach a fair deal with us based on market terms and conditions,” Disney said in a statement Friday.
“We stand ready to reach an equitable agreement with Google as quickly as possible in order to minimize the inconvenience to YouTube TV viewers by restoring our networks,” Disney said. “We hope Google will join us in that effort,” the statement continued.
YouTube TV says it has around 4 million subscribers, similar to Hulu’s Live TV service. Both of those are far behind the major distributors like Comcast, AT&T and Spectrum, which have between 15 and 20 million paying customers.