YouTube TV began restoring access to Disney content after a dispute between the companies led to an interruption of service over the weekend.
YouTube told viewers Sunday they were restoring service so customers could once again watch networks provided by Disney such as ESPN, FX, National Geographic and local ABC stations.
During the outage, viewers lost access to all live Disney content including recordings they had saved to their libraries.
YouTube TV, which is estimated to have more than 4 million subscribers in the United States, faced potential subscriber losses while the Disney channels were unavailable. Disney, meanwhile, was set to lose out on advertising and carriage-fee revenue until the networks were restored.
“We are pleased to announce that after a brief disruption, we have reached a new distribution agreement with Google’s YouTube TV for continued carriage of our portfolio of networks,” said a statement from Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution.
The statement continued: “We appreciate Google’s collaboration to reach fair terms that are consistent with the market, and we’re thrilled that our robust lineup of live sports and news plus kids, family and general entertainment programming is in the process of being restored to YouTube TV subscribers across the country.”
The outage stemmed from a breakdown in negotiations between YouTube and Disney over the contract between the companies, which expired late Friday. YouTube had wanted Disney to charge the company the same rate to carry its content that it charged other TV providers of similar size. The companies reached agreement Sunday.
YouTube apologized for the disruption and said it would provide a $15 credit to impacted customers.
Disney and Google’s previous deal expired on Friday while the companies were still at odds over carriage fees. This stalemate saw YouTube TV remove over a dozen Disney-owned cable networks and ABC-owned local stations from its streaming service. All DVR recordings of Disney programming were also blocked during the dark period.
Source: techxplore