Disney recently gave sports fans a cause for celebration — and a reason for dread.
The good news: Disney’s long-running fight with YouTube TV is over. Disney-owned channels, including ESPN, returned to YouTube TV on Friday night after a 15-day blackout, marking Disney’s longest carriage dispute to date.
The bad news: Disney warned in its latest annual report that more TV blackouts may be ahead. Disney has distribution contracts with pay-TV providers expiring in its fiscal year 2026, and told investors in its yearly 10-K form that negotiations “could lead to temporary or longer-term service blackouts.” These contracts can vary in length but typically last for three to five years.
“There’s a good chance” that carriage disputes between media firms and pay-TV providers will become commonplace in 2026, given the state of the TV industry, media analyst Alan Wolk of TVREV told Business Insider.
“There’s fewer and fewer video viewers,” Wolk said, referring to pay-TV subscriptions. “And I think that the media companies are just like, ‘OK, now we can really press our advantage.'”
As the cord-cutting movement continues, media firms and TV providers have tried to protect their businesses by squeezing existing customers for more money. That has created a vicious cycle where fewer people have a pay-TV subscription, except for die-hard fans of sports or cable news.
Disney’s argument, as Wolk noted, is that it owns highly valuable sports rights that make its networks a must-carry for any major TV provider.
But at some point, pay-TV customers could balk at how high their monthly bills have gotten. Google had said that paying Disney’s desired rates would have required it to raise YouTube TV’s price for the second time in a year.
YouTube TV had substantial leverage in its fight with Disney because of its backing by parent company Google. And while cable companies have been hit by cord-cutting, some are becoming less reliant on pay-TV subscriptions, which gives them their own leverage.
“TV is, at this point, a loss leader” for cable company Charter, Wolk said. He added that the video subscription business is primarily a way to retain broadband internet customers and “create stickiness” than to attract cord-nevers, or people who’ve never paid for cable.
Charter is thinking outside the cable box. The cable giant reached a deal with Disney in 2023 to bundle streaming services in its cable video package, a model that rival cable providers have since followed. While this isn’t a foolproof solution to pay-TV’s imperiled business model, it has helped slow Charter’s cord-cutting rate, as analyst Craig Moffett of research firm MoffettNathanson has noted.
“Charter is enjoying a remarkable turnaround driven by its bundled streaming packages,” Moffett wrote in a late October note, adding that it lost just 70,000 video subscribers in the third quarter, compared to 294,000 a year earlier. “The results are nothing short of extraordinary.”
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Cable companies like Charter and Comcast aren’t the only players in the pay-TV market. There are also satellite providers, such as DirecTV and Dish, as well as virtual TV services like YouTube TV, Fubo, and Hulu + Live TV.
DirecTV doesn’t have a backup business like broadband internet, but it’s also starting to experiment with bundling streamers. And it’s trying a strategy centered on so-called “skinny bundles” built around sports, news, or entertainment. Its pitch is that customers can get the channels they watch most, while paying less.
Media giants like Disney must get enough value for their networks to please investors, but TV providers increasingly have reasons not to back down. That could lead to more fights in 2026, and sports fans might get caught in the crossfire.
