YouTube TV Customers Lose Access To ABC Channels, DVR Recordings Due To Annoying, Avoidable Disney Contract Dispute

For the last decade or so, U.S. cable TV customers have been plagued by a steady parade of content blackouts as cable providers and broadcasters bicker over new programming contracts.

For the end user, so-called “retransmission feuds” usually go something like this: a TV broadcaster demands a cable company pay significantly more money to carry the same content. The pay TV provider balks, and one side or the other blacks out the aforementioned content. Consumers spend a few months paying for content they can’t access, while the two sides bitch at each other and try to leverage consumer anger against the other guy.

After a while a new confidential deal is struck, customers face a higher bill, and never get any sort of refund for missing content. Wash, rinse, repeat. Over and over again. With regulators largely sitting on their hands as U.S. consumers get shafted.

While streaming has fixed some of the shittier issues related to cable TV, these sorts of standoffs have made the jump to the modern era.

For example, Google and Disney have been in an ugly contract dispute since October 30 resulting in YouTube TV subscribers losing access to 21 ABC/Disney-owned TV channels, including ABC, ESPN, and The Disney Channel. Not only that, they’ve lost access to content they’d recorded to the cloud via the YouTube TV DVR system, according to Ars Technica:

“…the corporate conflict is highlighting another frustration in the streaming era. As Google and Disney continue duking it out, their customers have lost some access to content they thought was permanent: DVR files and digital movie purchases.”

As Techdirt has long noted, you don’t really own any of the things you pay for in the modern Internet era. And that apparently extends to content you thought you had stored on the servers of companies that can get dragged into annoying contract disputes.

A lot of folks got used to having some sort of “ownership” control over the content they’d saved to their DVR, but as YouTube TV’s help page points out, that’s no longer the case:

“Recordings of Disney content will be removed. If we’re able to reach an agreement with Disney and bring their content back to YouTube TV, subscribers will regain access to recordings that were previously in their library.”

In an act of retaliation, Google has also removed content customers may have purchased via Google Play and YouTube from Movies Anywhere, Disney’s centralized platform for content available on various distributors.

If this follows the trajectory of past disputes, this will continue for a few more weeks or months, with users failing to access content they pay for. Possibly without any sort of compensation. Then a confidential deal will be struck, and everybody will be forced to pay even more money for the same content. It’s the exact sort of annoying bullshit that helped trigger the cord cutting revolution in the first place.

Every so often the FCC hints that it might do something useful to prevent companies from taking out their inability to conduct business like adults out on their customers. But nothing ever really comes from it; and it’s certainly not going to be a priority for a Trump administration that’s busy stripping FCC consumer protection authority down to the studs under the pretense of efficiency.