YoutubeTV drops Disney channels

[Kevin M.]

Effective at midnight, ABC and ESPN are no longer available. Since Jeopardy airs on ABC here in LA, no point keeping YTTV if they don’t restore it. My mother in law can watch next day reruns commercial free on Peacock. 

Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Bob F]

Sinclair's CEO Chris Ripley, on the company's latest earnings call (their Q3 revenue declined 16%, and their net income has flipped to a loss), "said the company is lobbying for changes so that local TV station owners have control over such pay-TV distribution deals."

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/sinclair-q3-2025-earnings-abc-stations-jimmy-kimmel-boycott-1236570266/ (link)
B

Kevin M, Oct 30th:

[Tom Wolper]

That Variety article was a mess. I’m having a hard time figuring out what a Disney Google spat has to do with local stations.

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[Jim Ellwanger]

YouTubeTV’s carriage rights for local stations are set up differently than they are on cable systems. If Disney were feuding with Comcast, for example, then only ABC’s owned-and-operated affiliates would be removed from Comcast systems — Sinclair’s ABC affiliates would still be available.

However, with this Disney-Google dispute, ALL ABC affiliates are currently off YouTubeTV, including the ones Sinclair owns.

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[Adam Bowie]

I see that another fallout of this YouTube/Disney dispute is that YouTube is no longer part of the Disney owned "Movies Everywhere" - the service that lets you watch a movie you bought on Apple over on the YouTube app. That said, I'm not sure that Movies Everywhere ever extended beyond the US. Certainly, it never launched in the UK and consequently, I have films and series scattered across YouTube/Google, Amazon and Apple, each only available within its own app. (To be honest, I still prefer physical media for that reason).

Another casualty of the dispute seems to be that you can no longer buy or rent Disney titles on apps like YouTube. Certainly for me, all Disney's titles have disappeared.  Obviously, there are plenty of other places you can get the titles, but it shows how far the relationship has fallen apart.

Adam

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[PGage]

The same point was made on puck news last night (See you below).

 I experienced my first real pain of the YouTube TV/Disney war earlier this week when I found I was not able to access the Lakers-Spurs game, One of the real marquee matchups of the early NBA season. It was particularly painful because I thought I was immune to this blow because even though I usually watch ESPN NBA games via YouTube TV, I do also have the Disney bundle and my understanding had been that I would be able to access the NBA through the ESPN app. But it turned out. It seems like an access almost everything on the ESPN app EXCEPT the NBA. The app Ask for my TV provider when I try to access the game and when I told her it was YouTube TV basically laughed in my face. Early the next morning, I talked to my son who was in the same boat and he advised me to do what he had done, which was to search. “NBA Laker highlights” On regular YouTube, where I did find a pretty nice almost 30 minute long package of excerpts from the game that I could watch to get a feel of how the game had progressed and then also watched another 30 minute package of post game interviews. 

If Disney escalates its war by removing all of its content from regular YouTube, in addition to YouTube TV, we would not even have had that.

=========

• “As the standoff between YouTube TV and Disney grinds on, and YouTube TV subscribers experience one blacked-out game after another, my partner John Ourand called attention to yet another wrinkle. “Just hours after I wrote about how local broadcast groups, like Sinclair or Nexstar, were frustrated by the Disney blackout on YouTube TV, Sinclair C.E.O. Chris Ripley took his grievance public and called on regulators to step in,” John wrote. “The gripe centers on the difference between traditional distributors like Comcast or DirecTV, and virtual ones, like YouTube TV or Hulu+Live TV. In a dispute with Comcast, for example, Disney can only pull its owned-and-operated stations. While in a similar dispute with YouTube TV, it can pull all ABC stations, even affiliates owned by other broadcast groups.”
  
• This is likely to get uglier before reaching an inflection point and resolution. But I think that Disney’s actual leverage here isn’t simply yanking all their stations and sucking it up amid the outcry. Instead, what if they started pulling content not only from YouTube TV but YouTube, itself. Obviously, the leverage in this dynamic accrues to Google over time, but Disney has some levers right now—especially given how much sports fans rely on the YouTube platform for their interstitial sports fixes between games.”

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