00:00Things really kind of moved pretty quickly because Thursday morning, when Disney had its quarterly earnings report, they'd really kind of signaled that they were potentially in for the long haul and they were going to really stick to their guns.
00:11We don't know the full terms of the deal. It did seem like they did get pretty much parsing words, their desired economic terms.
00:19But once that sort of notion got out there that this thing could really go on for a while, there was a huge groan from the consumer marketplace that this was the last thing they wanted to hear.
00:30And I think having another weekend, big sports weekend of consumer blowback, I think sort of forced some energy in the direction of finally getting this done.
00:41It also seems like one of the keys to this deal is ESPN Unlimited being ingested into YouTube TV, I think by the end of 2026.
00:49What do we know about that? Because that's really sort of the key premium tier here for ESPN.
00:54Yeah, it's a huge part of this deal. There are some similar components in some of other deals that ESPN has.
01:02But having that sort of all the full bells and whistles of the direct to consumer product embedded within YouTube TV, it's a huge value add for their subscribers.
01:11So who, at the end of the day, do you think blinked first here? I mean, there was a lot of talk that maybe Google had won this won this carriage fight.
01:18Do you think Disney sort of blinked here?
01:20I would say base again, we don't know the full terms of the deal, but based on what we sort of parsed through,
01:25I would say the deal in and of itself looks to be kind of a draw where everybody kind of gets a little something and walks away a little unhappy at the same time, like a lot of these fights.
01:35So the core deal itself looks fairly even, but given, again, the stance of where Disney publicly said they were Thursday morning, again, that looks, you could sort of call it maybe a little bit of a blink.
01:48And I think it certainly is a surprise that in the span of about 36 hours, 35 hours to go from one posture to a radically different one, that certainly caught me off guard.
02:00So YouTube TV subscribers now have had a carriage sort of negotiation with Fox, with NBC, now here with ABC.
02:07Are there any other big ones for YouTube TV subscribers to have to worry about in the foreseeable future?
02:12Not for a little while here.
02:14I mean, there are some smaller ones that are certainly going to come up, but just in the last six or seven months here,
02:20YouTube TV has now done the full sweep of the four major broadcast networks in the U.S. and their respective companies.
02:27So that's Paramount and CBS and then NBC and then Fox and now Disney and ESPN.
02:35You know, those are all now done for multiple years.
02:38Is Rob Manford calling you?
02:40Who is that?
02:41With the last little bit of time that we got over here with you, any other things that really sort of stood out to you in this negotiation here?
02:51Again, it just how ugly this one really sort of got that the other ones, you know, resolved a little more quickly.
03:00This one, you know, for a variety of reasons, got, you know, really out there.
03:04It went for the 15 days.
03:06And in our world in sports, it just because, you know, we have sort of an over-indexing to a certain degree among YouTube TV subscribers, among hardcore sports fans.
03:17This one also seemed to resonate a little bit more deeply in our world.
03:22So for a variety of reasons, this one just, you know, really kind of bubbled up in a different way.
03:28And I think there will be some scars going forward.
03:30And what I'm also going to be interested to see is how they sort of come out on the other side.
03:35Because, you know, a couple of years ago had a bruising one between Disney and Spectrum.
03:40And now they talk openly and publicly about all the new ground they're breaking together.
03:45And so, you know, it's one thing to get the deal done.
03:48But sort of then to get to this other level like Disney has with Spectrum, it's going to be very interesting to see if we get to any sort of posture like that with you two.
03:56I'm glad you mentioned all of this because, look, Eric, you've covered these fights when they're with cable networks like Charter or Spectrum.
04:02Do we think we've learned anything differently about the negotiations with tech companies like Google?
04:07And is this sort of like portend anything down the road about how these negotiations could go in the future?
04:13Yeah, it's certainly worth noting that the scale and the economic resources and the pressure points for Google,
04:22just given the nature of their company and their size, are very different than some of these other legacy carriers.
04:28And so, yes, you know, perhaps a bit of a wake up call for programmers of all types that you have to sort of go into this with a different strategy and a different mindset.
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