After DirecTV had its say Tuesday in an hour-long conference call with Wall Street analysts, Disney hit back at the pay-TV operator as the companies’ carriage impasse enters its fourth day.“DirecTV continues to misrepresent the facts around our ongoing negotiations,” Disney said in a statement from Dana Walden and Alan Bergman, co-chairmen, Disney Entertainment; and Jimmy Pitaro, chairman, ESPN. “Our priority is to reach a marketplace deal that serves the needs of DirecTV and their customers while also recognizing the value of our top-quality content and the significant investment required to create and acquire it. We believe there is a path to a fair and flexible agreement that strikes this critical balance and works for all sides, especially the consumer.”Disney networks, including ABC and ESPN, went dark Sunday evening across DirecTV’s satellite, internet and cable systems. The carriage dispute has left 11 million-plus subscribers without access to college football and prime-time shows like The Bachelorette. Two major programming milestones are approaching next week: Monday Night Football and the presidential debate hosted by ABC.While carriage negotiations have long created friction around the fees programmers demand from distributors, the advent of streaming has made the process of reaching a deal more complicated. Disney a year ago had a 10-day outage on Charter’s Spectrum cable systems. The resulting agreement left a handful of networks without cable carriage, but it included key stipulations for the integration of streaming services for Spectrum subscribers.DirecTV has publicly advocated for smaller bundles and says it has pitched several of them – including a sports-focused package – to Disney without success. Disney counters that DirecTV, despite its pronouncements, has not “meaningfully engaged” with any proposal for slimmer, cheaper packages of channels. A Disney spokesperson says the company has put forward a sports-focused offering including ABC and the ESPN networks as well as an entertainment-based offering.While pundits are divided on the question of whether the arrival of NFL football will be enough to force a settlement of the dispute, a Disney spokesperson pointed to the overall value of the portfolio beyond just sports. More than 90% of DirecTV households watched Disney linear programming every month in 2023, the highest level of engagement for any content owner on the platform, according to Nielsen.The spokesperson noted that Disney is asking for rates in line with the broader marketplace, “and that reflect the value of Disney’s content.”
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