Why DirecTV subscribers have lost ESPN and ‘Monday Night Football,’ explained

The most significant beef at the start of the NFL season isn’t on the field — but in broadcasting. A longstanding dispute between DirecTV and The Walt Disney Company (which owns ESPN) has now bled into the regular season, and fans are suffering as a result.

It’s led to finger pointing from both sides, blame deflection, and subscribers stuck in the middle just frustrated and confused why they can’t watch football on Monday nights. Let’s cut through the noise come from both DirecTV and Disney to dive into this whole beef.

What exactly changed?
Very simply, a contract ended between DirecTV and Disney which dictated the channels which would be supplied to DirecTV, and how much these would cost. This is referred to as “carriage rights,” and is built in to every single channel you have as part of a TV subscription.

Carriage fees are closely-guarded numbers, but for example Disney might provide a company with its entire suite of networks (ABC, ESPN, Disney Channel, and FX among others) and in exchange ask for $8 a month per subscriber. When 10-15 different carriers are all asking for their carriage rights and supplying their channels this is where your cable bill comes from, with a markup added on top by the cable/satellite company itself.

What is the dispute over Disney carriage on DirecTV?
It’s over money, but not in the traditional sense as we’ve seen in past carriage rights disputes. In the past these have been related to media companies demanding more for carriage from cable providers, but DirecTV’s gripe is different.

The biggest frustration for consumers is that cable and satellite TV became bloated. Subscribers would need to pay for upwards of 200 channels, when in reality they only wanted 20-30 of them on a regular basis. This in turn made streaming options more compelling, causing people to ditch their cable in favor of a few, more-narrow streaming services, allowing them to get less programming, but pay lower fees.

DirecTV wanted to streamline its offerings by not retaining all of Disney’s channels, or at least not including them all in their most-common channel bundle. It’s believed that DirecTV wanted to keep ESPN, Disney, and FX channels, while dropping Freeform, Nat Geo, and a handful of other properties owned by the company.

Naturally they wanted to pay less for this as a result.

This was rejected by Disney, who wanted an all-or-nothing approach to their programming. That’s where the impasse resulted, and is still ongoing.

Technological limitations play into this as well
Once seen as a pioneer of new technology over traditional cable, satellite companies like DirecTV have not aged well as we’ve moved predominantly to a streaming model. Charter communications (the parent company of cable giant Spectrum) had a similar dispute with Disney in 2023, also wanting to lose some of Disney’s ancillary channels to streamline their programming.

Similar to DirecTV this was rejected at first, but eventually reached an agreement where Disney would allow for lower carriage fees for only their premiere channels, in exchange for Spectrum offering bundles that included Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, and other Disney-owned streaming services via their broadband network.

However, while a majority of cable subscribers use the same company for their home internet, the same isn’t the case for DirecTV. While the satellite giant is owned by AT&T, there’s no direct link between their TV and internet businesses. This means technological limitations ensure there’s no good way for DirecTV to sweeten this deal with bundling Disney streaming services, or broadening their distribution.

DirecTV has nothing to offer in exchange for losing these channels and paying less. Disney refuses to budge on their offer. So we’re stuck.

The only people suffering are fans
There are an estimated 11.3 million DirecTV subscribers in the United States, and falling each year. However, satellite remains the best, most-reliable way to get programming in remote areas that don’t have cable access.

There’s no end in sight for this dispute. Subscribers have already lost access to their first week of Monday Night Football as well as U.S. Open tennis, and are poised to miss Week 2 as well. There are a huge number of people who only keep live TV programming for sports, and this dispute had prevented them from watching the biggest national game of the week while two giant companies bicker over carriage rights.

Both will keep pointing fingers and blaming each other, but it doesn’t look like we’re moving any closer to a resolution. Disney reportedly offered a pause on the blackout for Tuesday night, allowing DirecTV to broadcast the Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, which DirecTV responded to by demanding all Disney programming for two weeks — and thus the blackout continues.

It’s a shame for fans, and hopefully the dispute will end soon.