Charter, Spectrum’s Owner, Calls Out Pay-TV Model As Broken

Charter

Charter Communications, one of the giants of Cable TV, is currently in a negotiation battle against Disney regarding contract fees. The battle has resulted in several million people with no access to college football and the US Open. With no resolution in sight, “Monday Night Football” as well as the first few days of the NFL season might also face the same fate.

Charter Continues Negotiation With Disney

On August 31st, Disney stated that it is continuing negotiations with Charter. However, a fresh deal has not yet been agreed upon. As a result, the customers of Charter lost access to the networks under the company. This includes broadcasters ABC as well as FX and ESPN which are pay-TV channels. On September 1st, both the stocks of Disney and Charter had gone down by over 2%.

The service called Spectrum TV, which is offered by Charter, has approximately 14.7 million subscribers. It covers 41 states. The top markets for TV for the communications giant are Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, and New York. These kinds of battles that can cause “blackouts” for customers on pay-TV are not a rare occurrence for the industry. However, this time there is a difference, especially since streaming is so widespread now.

Chris Winfrey, the CEO of Charter, explained that this was not a usual carriage dispute. Early on September 1st, executives of the communications company referred to the ecosystem of pay TV as “broken”.

They claimed that the revamped Disney deal hoped to offer customers of cable access to the ad-supported streaming services of Disney such as ESPN+ and Disney+ without having to pay anything extra. The communications giant also claimed to have accepted the higher fee request by Disney in exchange. However, there were no specifics provided by the executives about the negotiations since they are still optimistic about getting the deal signed.