Spectrum customers in SC lose Disney channels, including ESPN. What to know
It’s a bad day for many college football fans.
Spectrum cable customers lost access to Disney-owned channels Thursday evening because of an ongoing contract dispute. Those lost channels include ESPN and ABC — a hit to the gut for viewers who want to watch Week 1 of college football season.
Some local ABC affiliate stations across the U.S. have reportedly been impacted.
However, ABC 25 Columbia was still showing regular programming as of 9 a.m. on Friday. The local affiliate channel is owned by Bahakel Communications, so shouldn’t be affected by the outage. The channel even showed an ad Friday morning promoting the highly anticipated football game between the University of South Carolina and the University of North Carolina, set to broadcast Saturday evening.
Unlike the USC game though, Clemson’s Monday night game at Duke will be broadcast by ESPN and so will be unavailable to Spectrum customers unless a deal is reached by then.
The reason for the lost channels is because Charter Communications, which owns Spectrum, has been in carriage contract negotiations with the Walt Disney Company.
On a Spectrum-owned website called disneyespnfairdeal.com, the company wrote that Disney seeks an “excessive increase” from them.
“The Walt Disney Company has removed their programming from Spectrum which creates hardship for our customers. We offered Disney a fair deal, yet they are demanding an excessive increase. They also want to limit our ability to provide greater customer choice in programming packages forcing you to take and pay for channels you may not want,” Spectrum wrote.
Disney said in a statement on Thursday that the deal they want a “market-based agreement” with Charter.
“Disney Entertainment has successful deals in place with pay TV providers of all types and sizes across the country, and the rates and terms we are seeking in this renewal are driven by the marketplace,” the statement read. “We’re committed to reaching a mutually agreed upon resolution with Charter and we urge them to work with us to minimize the disruption to their customers.”
This story was originally published September 1, 2023 at 9:34 AM.
