How Long Can Disney Hold Out As Rivals Shape Football Season For Fans?

Disney and DirecTV’s carriage dispute has been going for eight days now, and there’s no resolution in sight just yet. If you’re looking for a highly-detailed rundown of the ins and outs of those negotiations (or lack thereof), The Hollywood Reporter has one, as do many other outlets.

What we’re talking about instead here is the real-world impact on audience attention if this dispute stretches further into the fall.

Over the the past four decades, Disney-owned ESPN has become a central hub of the college football season, and for fans of teams in the ACC and SEC, the only place where you can watch live games. As a fan of Syracuse myself, ESPN has been the primary method by which of watched college sports since I was a kid and the Orange were part of the Big East. Wittingly or unwittingly, I’ve also consumed college sports through ESPN’s lens and it’s shaped how I follow those sports.

But during week two of the college football season this past weekend, I — a DirecTV Stream subscriber — had to see how the “other half” lives, so to speak, watching the sport via Fox, NBC and CBS platforms.

What started as something that needed significant adjustments to my previous behaviors quickly just morphed into a short-term (for now) routine. I watched whatever Fox game was on until I saw a better option elsewhere. I watched Peacock for the Oregon/Boise State (West Coast) primetime game. The studio coverage was a bit weird since it barely touched on what the ACC and SEC were doing. Ultimately, though, it didn’t feel like I was missing much without ESPN, despite not being able to watch a second of Syracuse’s upset win over Georgia Tech.

I’m not claiming that SEC diehards or fans of some of the ACC’s bigger programs felt the same way. They were likely outraged by the fact that they couldn’t watch their team or its conference-mates. And in my past life without kids and writing about SU sports, I would’ve been far more irritated by the development myself.

Yet, plenty of college football viewers (on DirecTV and elsewhere) are casual viewers; low-investment fans of a specific team or region of football, or folks who just want a game on. Out-of-home, the bar’s going to play whatever they have and if they’re DirecTV subscribers, “whatever they have” didn’t include SEC or ACC games this past weekend. It may not this coming weekend either.

Along with that actual game coverage, there’s also the weekly TV agenda-setting that fans lose out on without ESPN. Instead, they’ll go without it, or just check out what Fox is doing in that department (admittedly, it’s something less nationally-focused than ESPN, but if you’re casually tuning in, you’re not noticing that). The longer that goes on, perhaps, the longer audiences start to wonder just how much the need ESPN’s lens on the sport — or even sports at all.

And that’s where the peril really lies for ESPN, in my opinion.

The “Worldwide Leader in Sports” has been here before, of course, back in 2020. Without sports, the network didn’t have much to offer audiences. As streaming emerged, TV viewers realized how much they were paying for ESPN and sports in general, as part of their cable/satellite package, and started cutting the cord at a higher rate. That was one of several big reasons why the traditional bundle started to fracture as media companies pushed streaming services.

Lacking ESPN and some of its major fall sports content (namely college football and Monday Night Football in immediate term) has some danger for DirecTV as well. But you could argue those still using the satellite provider aren’t as tethered to its sports offerings as they once were when it was the exclusive home of NFL Sunday Ticket, and DirecTV’s customer base was larger. So there’s a chance the sports part of it has less effect than the looming fall TV season’s impact — when ABC’s primetime lineup won’t be present on DirecTV without a resolution here.

For as much as that could lead to more subscribers fleeing for alternative MVPDs/vMVPDs like Hulu (which Disney is offering $30 credits toward), the current fractured TV environment could just leave Disney out of the picture. Plenty of subscribers will just continue on without primetime ABC content, and chalk it up to missing it completely or just catching up on demand later when the dispute is resolved. Same with sports, too. If you were feeling like you had limited space for tuning into games anyway, this just made your decisions easier.

This knowledge is emboldening both Disney and DirecTV to some extent. Yet, I’d bet that it’s Disney that really feels the pressure more here. After the Venu setbacks and given the fuzzy timing around its ESPN direct-to-consumer app launch, there are only so many levers yet to pull in negotiations with carriers and appeals to consumers.

When ESPN launches DTC, facing a viewing public that sees it at odds with carriers won’t help sell them on a standalone service. Neither will any lingering ideas that they can actually get along just fine without Disney’s traditional TV content.

There’s no definitive date that a deal between Disney and DirecTV HAS TO get done by here. Still, Disney has a limited window to play with before it loses its footing on this college football season — and maybe even less time before DirecTV’s NFL audiences simply move on without Monday Night action.