At the end of October, Disney removed its services from YouTube TV due to an ongoing dispute about the price of their per-subscriber fee, according to The New York Times.
Customers lost access to entertainment and election coverage, but the biggest loss for many people was sports. Disney owns ESPN and affiliates, ABC and two other major sports broadcasting companies, so this dispute caused a major loss of access to major sports broadcasting. Customers can no longer view popular sports programming like College Game Day and Monday Night Football.
YouTube TV is no stranger to disputes over sports coverage. In August and September, the company’s ten million subscribers were left in limbo over contract disputes between Fox and NBC, but according to The New York Times, they were resolved before major programming was impacted.
As the fourth-largest TV distributor in the U.S., YouTube TV has a large stake in the current dispute. It is projected to be the largest television service by the end of the decade, so sports streaming is a major sector to protect for broadcast services, according to the LA Times.
YouTube TV also relies on a more loyal customer base than cable companies such as Spectrum or satellite companies like DIRECTV because many of their customers switched to the service for its lower rates. According to the LA Times, because of this price loyalty, YouTube TV is not concerned about customer defection in response to the Disney dispute.
Disney does not have the luxury of allowing this debate to continue indefinitely however. In the highly competitive field of sports broadcasting, sports rights contracts have nearly doubled in cost in the past 10 years. According to the LA Times, Disney owes the NBA $2.6 billion a year and the NFL $2.7 billion a year, along with large fees for smaller sports markets like wrestling.
As more streaming services enter the market, the competition has become increasingly intense, and disputes have become more frequent. Sports fans must choose among all of the different services to watch events every week.
For example, to watch Sunday NFL games, fans must have NBC or Fox under YouTube TV or Spectrum. For Thursday Night Football, fans have to watch on Amazon Prime, and for Monday Night Football, they must have ESPN.
For an average fan, this is a cumbersome system, and many advocate for the old system, which only required one sports cable package, and while expensive, guaranteed access to all of the games.
This new, disjointed system caused Sports Illustrated to release a guide to the missed sports each week with alternate ways to view, though most require an additional fee or subscription.
While this reaction may seem dramatic to those not invested in sports, fans of popular American sports leagues are not just concerned with missing one game a week. Fans are fed up with the constant debate between large media conglomerates that try to position themselves as victims in moments of greed.
Both Disney and YouTube TV released a statement blaming the other for the dispute, but the complaints about unfair contracts are ironic to a public already spending an excessive amount to simply watch live TV.
In an attempt to gain a loyal fan base, these companies instead created a public disillusioned by the sports market, a pastime widely considered an escape from the divisiveness of current events and political strife.
A variety of research on the impact of sports on mental health concludes that watching sports is beneficial. By watching in a group, sports promote belonging and community, which increases productivity and reduces crime, according to Science Daily. According to Frontiers in Psychology, watching sports also magnifies positive emotions and increases overall well-being.
So when fans are trying to watch a game in a unified, positive environment and are met with the impacts of the constant bickering of companies worth billions of dollars, they don’t pick a side. Instead, their frustration towards the industry builds, and sports become a financial sacrifice.
Middle and lower-class Americans should not be priced out of sports viewership, especially when their exclusion contradicts the unifying idea sports fanbases are built on. The continued debate between YouTube TV and Disney exists in parallel to the broader issues facing everyday Americans, where the rich battle over minimal financial gain at the expense of broad public interests.
There is little sports fans can do while they wait out a resolution, but this conflict provides a valuable moment to reflect on how excessively rich conglomerates have an abnormal and unacceptable level of power in broader society.
