Last year at this time, I wrote about how a carriage rights dispute between AT&T and Nexstar was depriving me of watching some NFL games because Nexstar owns our local Fox affiliate. A couple of months after that was settled, AT&T and Tegna (which owns our local NBC affiliate) got into a similar battle, which I wrote about here. That not only cost me Sunday night football, but every episode of “Jeopardy!” too.
Now we’re being impacted by another rights fee clash (the third in twelve months), this time between AT&T and Disney — and it came at the worst possible time for my wife. As I’ve mentioned many times, she’s a huge tennis fan who, during the Grand Slam events (Wimbledon, French Open, Australian Open, and US Open) commits several hours each day to watching matches between her favorite players.
Well, the AT&T-Disney contract expired Saturday night and on Sunday, she woke up to find that the Disney-owned ESPN channels were blacked out on our AT&T-owned U-Verse system — just as the tournament began its second week and headed for the finals this weekend. She can’t even go to a local sports bar to catch the action, because they all get their feeds from DirecTV, another subsidiary of, yes, AT&T.
To make matters worse, we tried signing up for ESPN+, assuming for the $10.99/month fee it would show every match on every court — but no! The headline matches (e.g. Dimitrov-Tiafoe last night, Swiatek-Pegula tonight) are only available on the ESPN feed connected to a TV provider (like U-Verse). Only the minor matches, being played on the outer courts, come through on ESPN+.
This will have a small impact on my viewing of the upcoming NFL season because Monday Night Football is on ESPN. But I can’t stand the announcing duo of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, and they usually get the weakest games on the schedule, so it’s not as big a loss for me as it was last year.
My wife, who once worked in the linear TV world, wonders if the sponsors who bought commercial time during the US Open are entitled to rebates from Disney/ESPN because of the decreased audience size. I don’t know, but if I owned a company that advertised on those broadcasts, I’d at least demand some make-goods.
This is going down at a time when tennis has become more popular than ever. TV ratings for the Grand Slam events were at record levels this year. The New York Times just ran a piece about how the US Open’s Billie Jean King Tennis Center has become so overcrowded it doesn’t have enough seats for all the attendees.
I find it ironic the game is hitting new peaks of interest after the era of Serena Williams, Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal — the biggest draws over the last two decades. Fortunately, there’s a whole new crop of exciting young players for viewers to root for. And let’s not downplay the impact of sports gambling on viewership. Not just of tennis, but all the major sports.
But none of that happens if people can’t watch it on TV, and for now, at least, that includes my very unhappy wife.
BTW, if you’d like a great deep-dive on the whole carriage-rights standoff, read this piece by Rick Ellis, the man behind AllYourScreens.com and the Too Much TV newsletter.