As the YouTube–Disney carriage battle approaches the 2-week mark, it is following the financial trajectory of many such standoffs: Both sides appear to be losing, to varying degrees.
The question now is, how willing are the combatants to endure more pain if the impasse continues?
ABC, ESPN and other Disney networks went dark October 30 on YouTube TV, which is now the No. 3 U.S. pay-TV provider with 10 million subscribers. Industry and subscriber hopes that a second week of Monday Night Football would hasten the end of the clash went by the boards. Thus far, two revenue-rich Saturday slates of college football and two Monday night contests have been wiped out, with a 21% hit to ratings on the November 3 game between the Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals.
Along with ratings, Disney also is not receiving any fees from YouTube in exchange for its programming. A report Tuesday from Morgan Stanley media analyst Ben Swinburne puts Disney under the spotlight as the media giant gets set to report quarterly earnings on Thursday morning. Swinburne pegs the losses to Disney from the carriage fight at about $60 million over a 14-day period, meaning about $4.3 million a day. While the media giant is transitioning to streaming, it still rakes in billions from its legacy pay-TV operation, so it can ill afford to sacrifice a large chunk of it.
Disney’s earnings won’t reflect any financial hit from the carriage fight, which started after the late-September end to the quarter, but execs are likely to offer comments on the situation. (CEO Bob Iger wasn’t asked about it, nor did he raise the topic, during his appearance Monday night on Eli and Peyton Manning’s alternate Monday Night Football telecast on ESPN2.)
The conventional wisdom – that Disney needs YouTube more than YouTube needs Disney – has a lot of truth to it. YouTube TV parent Alphabet has a market value of more than $3 trillion, so variations in YouTube TV’s business don’t make a difference in its overall financials or stock price. When it reports quarterly numbers, Alphabet breaks out ad revenue and other metrics for YouTube, but shares nothing relative to its pay-TV operation, which has grown to 10 million subscribers since launching in 2017.
However, before you assume that YouTube TV is impervious to losses, consider the fact that the company has aggressively gone after the living room in recent years. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, an avid NFL fan, pursued and won rights to the league’s Sunday Ticket package, paying $2 billion a year over seven years. The tech firm then bundled the premium package with YouTube TV at a discounted rate.
The football bundle means that many of the estimated 1.5 million subscribers to Sunday Ticket are now unable to get Monday Night Football and other sports airing on ESPN, ABC and other Disney networks. If they cancel and opt for a rival service, they lose access to Sunday Ticket just as the season is entering its competitive home stretch. In that sense, stiff-arming Disney is not likely to result in long-term satisfied customers.
Mohan also has been beating the drum for Emmy voters to give YouTube creators full consideration. Granted, that’s on the YouTube side and not behind the pay wall of the YouTube TV bundle, but it’s not the optimal look.
Could Disney chart a path forward without YouTube TV? It’s a stretch but technically possible, especially because the company has recently added two major weapons in its arsenal: a beefed-up ESPN subscription service and pay-TV operator Fubo. If Swinburne’s estimate is accurate, though, it would mean walking away from $1.6 billion in annual distribution revenue and hoping the proceeds from owned and operated platforms would eventually make up that shortfall.
ESPN’s Unlimited offering, which launched last August, will reach 3 million subscribers and generate $500 million in incremental revenue by the end of fiscal 2026 (next September), Morgan Stanley’s Swinburne estimates. Research firm Antenna said ESPN’s new app had drawn 2.1 million sign-ups by September 30. Promotions for the app have been stepped up during the blackout and the NFL, a partner with ESPN in a pending deal for NFL Media assets, has also pointed out the ESPN app option for YouTube TV customers.
Fubo’s total revenue in 2024 was $1.62 billion.
YouTube TV has charged that Disney is not bringing reasonable proposals to the table and entered the final stages of negotiations before the blackout without urgency, all in order to push subscribers to its own platforms. Disney emphatically denies that accusation, and says YouTube TV is not offering it fair market value.
Shortly before the blackout began, Disney announced the closing of a deal to take 70% control of Fubo last month, giving it 6 million pay-TV subscribers on Fubo and Hulu + Live TV. That’s a sizable rival to YouTube TV, and early data from research firm Apptopia (which measures app downloads, not subscription sign-ups) showed Fubo to be the leading beneficiary of people switching providers.
Because most of its competitors’ subscriber bases are shrinking due to cord-cutting, YouTube TV is widely expected to soon become the No. 1 pay-TV provider in the U.S. That status could make it even bolder than it has been in 2025, clashing with five major programmers and letting two of them go dark for long periods. It is also the case, though, that losing subscribers is still a sacrifice of revenue.
Already, the subscriber base has been willing to vote with its feet based on YouTube TV’s aggressive price hikes, notably the two of them in barely a year that jacked up rates by almost 20%. Veteran media analyst Craig Moffett, in a report last June, estimated that YouTube TV shed about 500,000 subscribers over the pricing jolt, though many subsequently returned for football season.
YouTube TV on Sunday offered subscribers a $20 credit for enduring the Disney blackout. That won’t mean it will automatically part with $200 million given its scale, though. As other operators have previously done, it set up the credit in such a way that subscribers need to opt into it rather than it being automatically applied to their bills.
