Iger Takes the L
Mickey the Great and Terrible has raised the white flag in the Great Cable War of 2023. Charter is victorious.
Ten days past, Disney pulled all of their content on Charter Cable’s fifteen million viewers, to include ESPN at the start of football season.
Pro and college football fans were incensed… at Disney.
Cancer Rat was for his part shocked that people would blame him for something he did.
Disney was demanding a price hike from Charter. Spectrum/Charter said, look asshole you’re double dipping my customer base when it’s in decline. In the past few years, the cable market has dropped by thirty million people and if Elon Musk can get Starlink working more reliably we are going to lose a hell of a lot more than that. You want to gouge my customers? You gotta give them better value for what you’re bringing to the table.
For what you are demanding my subscribers should get access to Disney+ and ESPN+.
Mickey the Great and Terrible laughed and said, ‘They get nothing and I’m pulling the plug on everything. No ABC, no Disney Channel, Plus, Junior, or XD. And especially no ESPN at the start of the football season. Your subscribers are going to start dumping you by the carload if you don’t cave to me. So cave to me. NOW.’
Charter said no, and Disney pulled the plug.
And much to Devil Mouse’s horror people blamed Disney for something Disney had done.
Charter had simply put up a screen on those blank channels saying what had happened. Something you have to understand about Disney, there is a pillar of their corporate culture that immutably states, ‘Disney is the strongest brand in the world.’ It’s not. At least not anymore. Sure, “Pixie Dust is a hell of a drug,” but there are a lot less Dusters these days than Mickey can admit there are. The average family has gone from not liking to hear bad things about Disney to not trusting their children to watch Cancer Rat’s content unsupervised.
Charter turned out to have a better acquaintance with reality and decided to simply wait it out.
Bob started to sweat when Charter’s customers started blaming Disney for something Disney had done and tried to cheat.
Disney is so completely captured by the Left that if they have a political problem with a state as completely controlled by the GOP such as Florida, they still turn to the Democrats because it is unthinkable for them to do otherwise. There is however an advantage to this. The Walt Disney Company is now home to many useless mouths who have politically connected parents. These connections only go one way but that was just fine for what Bob needed.
Governor Hochul of New York State stepped in last week and announced that Charter was going to be required to pay New York residents a refund for the cable services they are not providing due to Disney’s refusal to provide them.
Now if you’re wondering why Iger went to Hochul, here’s the answer: Spectrum/Charter is a major cable provider for New York City and most of New York state come to that and there was a timebomb that started ticking as soon as Disney pulled their content. The premier installment of this year’s Monday Night Football is between the Bills and the Jets.
Once the Empire State Mob decided to blame Disney for not being able to watch this match-up between its two favorite teams, the pressure was on.
Nobody was quite certain how Hochul was going to enforce this, although there probably is something on New York’s contractual laws. It was actually belling the cat that would be the issue since this hadn’t come up before.
Charter thought about that for a little bit and then offered a free promotional sub of FUBO.TV. I was vaguely aware of its existence but I didn’t know a thing about it. And I still don’t other than it provides ESPN and ABC “live without cable.”
This maneuver hamstrung Disney.
Right before the clock ran out Iger caved on everything.
“(T)he Disney+ and ESPN+ streaming services will be made available to Spectrum cable customers at no extra cost, which Disney had initially balked at.
In addition, Charter customers will eventually receive the planned direct-to-consumer ESPN streaming service that is in the works but has no launch date.”
Disney will not receive a fee for these services.
ABC, Disney Channel, FX, NatGeo and the full suite of ESPN have resumed.
Charter customers will no longer be getting Baby TV, FreeForm, FXM, FXX, Disney Junior, Disney XD, NatGeo Wild, and Nat Geo Mundo. Basically, Charter will no longer be providing the channels that Disney gutted to build Disney+ but their customers will be getting Disney+… For free.
HA! HA! HA! (gasp… wheeze…gasp) HA! HA! HA!
