On November 4, the biggest televised event of the evening was unavailable to millions of viewers. As the Arizona Cardinals and Dallas Cowboys kicked off Monday Night Football, over nine million Americans subscribed to Google's YouTube TV were met with a notification of a programming dispute instead of the game. This wasn't a technical glitch. It was a tactical, well-executed move in competitive strategy. For the consumer paying $82.99 a month, the experience was ruined. For close industry observers, this was another example of Disney's decades-long plan to dismantle the distributor business model and seize control of its replacement.
This blackout is not a result of a negotiation failure. It is a deliberate, precisely timed churn event orchestrated by Disney. The timing is the entire story. The contract expired and channels vanished on October 30. This was just one day after Disney closed its acquisition of a 70% controlling stake in Fubo, which it is merging with its existing Hulu + Live TV service. That transaction, which closed on October 29, instantly created a new virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (vMVPD) behemoth with nearly 6 million subscribers, making Disney the undisputed #2 virtual distributor in the country.
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This blackout, therefore, is the first major shot fired in a vMVPD-versus-vMVPD war. Disney is executing a classic squeeze on the largest provider, YouTube TV. The first front is content: using its stranglehold on live sports, assets amassed through acquisitions like 21st Century Fox to demand carriage fees that would erase YouTube TV's margins or force a massive consumer price hike. The second front is distribution: using the failure of those negotiations to inflict maximum pain (no Monday Night Football) on YouTube TV's 10 million subscribers, thereby driving those customers directly to its own, newly acquired Fubo/Hulu platform.
The strategy is a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition for Google. If Google capitulates to Disney's fee demands, its $82.99 price point becomes unprofitable, forcing a price hike that will fuel subscriber churn. If Google fights the blackout, as it is doing now, it is threatened by a subscriber exodus to the only other major vMVPD that carries ESPN. Disney's public statements accusing Google of "market dominance" are interesting given that Disney is using its exclusive rights to sought-after content (e.g., Monday Night Football) to attack its single largest competitor.
The primary loser is the consumer. The promise of cord-cutting was choice, flexibility, and lower prices. Consumers fled $100+ cable bills, only to find themselves rebuilding the same expensive bundle. They now face an $82.99/month vMVPD bill on top of a half-dozen direct-to-consumer (DTC) apps, whose prices are also exploding. Disney just hiked its ad-free Disney+ to $18.99/month and its bundles to $29.99. Blackouts, blame-game warnings and fragmented content are the new normal. Consumers are trapped without another option.
Related:Fubo launches 'Channel Store' to hawk standalone streaming services
This is precisely what happened with cable. For years, distributors like Comcast, Charter and others were forced to absorb Disney's escalating programming costs. These were passed on to consumers as the "Regional Sports Network Fee" and "Broadcast TV Fee", the line items that made customers hate their cable provider. Disney got the revenue; Comcast took the blame. The 2023 Disney-Charter dispute was the beta test for the new era, forcing Charter to bundle Disney's streaming services, effectively merging the old and new models. YouTube TV is simply a new digital-native victim of this same squeeze play.
Even the market leader is not safe. Google has over 9.4 million subscribers and more than 40% of the vMVPD market, making it the biggest customer and the biggest threat. And Disney just turned them off. Churn is the key metric here. The baseline monthly churn for vMVPDs is a relatively stable 4.5%. But live sports, particularly the NFL, are the primary anchor for this high-value segment. The vMVPD subscriber base is highly sensitive to channel defections, and fast switching is a hallmark of the sector. If churn goes up to 10%, which we have seen in other cases before, that is a potential near term loss of nearly 1 million subscribers on YouTube TV's 9.4 million subscriber base. These churning customers will bleed directly to Disney's Fubo / Hulu service.
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The ultimate winner is Disney. The Fubo acquisition was strategic and well-timed. Fubo had been suing Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery for anti-competitive behavior, arguing they were being forced to carry expensive non-sports channels. By acquiring a 70% stake, Disney silenced its loudest legal critic and acquired its primary distribution weapon in a single transaction. The Department of Justice, in a move that cleared the merger, approved it in October. Days later, Disney weaponized its newly consolidated market position.
This consolidation creates a new, hostile duopoly for the entire vMVPD market, as seen in the Q2 2025 subscriber data.
(Source: nScreenMedia 2025/Recon Analytics)
(Source: nScreenMedia 2025)
Content owners' dominant market position makes the distribution market fraught with risks. It poses a critical risk to major telcos. Any carrier, like Verizon with its +play platform or AT&T, that has built a convergence strategy around reselling third-party vMVPD services, is now exposed. They risk becoming the next "cable company": a reseller trapped in the middle, forced to pass on Disney's price hikes and take the customer service blame for Disney's blackouts.
For the major telcos, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, this chaos is a warning. The vMVPD market is a low-margin game with escalating content costs. They cannot simply 'not play,' but they must change the game. It is not a question of if they will be stabbed by price hikes and blackouts, but when. The only winning move is to isolate their core service from the content wars, clearly pointing to the content owners as the culprits for price hikes and the vMVPDs as the other end of those negotiations. In this, they can focus on the real, long-term, high-margin battle for the home: the broadband connection.
For Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, the growth engine is not in content, but Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). T-Mobile and Verizon have already raced past their 2025 FWA targets, signing up millions of subscribers. AT&T is aggressively ramping its "Internet Air" service, using its new spectrum to battle cable in key markets like Houston. This is the strategy. FWA is a direct, asymmetric assault on the cable industry's high-margin broadband monopoly, and it's a product the telcos own and control end-to-end.
Recon Analytics data supports this point. FWA is a "threat to everybody," legacy DSL and cable and to a lesser extent, fiber. Our research shows that FWA and fiber customers are often distinct customer groups with different purchase decision criteria. FWA scores exceptionally high on value, ease of installation and customer satisfaction, while fiber competes on pure speed. Critically, our data shows that for FWA, the anchor product is the mobile line; FWA is the high-margin 'upsell'. This is the true convergence bundle (Mobile + FWA/Fiber) that telcos can use to build a profitable, defensible market position, with no real reliance on content like their old linear TV models.
This is another tactical move from Disney; they have done this before, and they will likely do it again. The winning position is to be a reseller, not a distributor. Let Google take the blame for its dispute with Disney while it remains the enabler, the neutral, reliable Internet provider that gives consumers access to the chaotic streaming world.
For now, the winner is Disney. It has achieved vertical integration, controlling the most valuable content (live sports) and the #2 distribution platform. The loser is the American consumer, who gained only the illusion of increased choice, and got complexity and increased costs in the process. Google's YouTube TV is now a market leader under siege from its most important supplier. Google must decide now whether to pay the ransom or keep going on without one of the main draws of their service. Either way, their customers are going to feel it.
About Recon Analytics
Recon Analytics, a Light Reading contributor, delivers near-real-time market intelligence for the telecom and artificial intelligence sectors through its Recon Analytics Pulse platform. Each year, Recon reaches more than half a million consumers, empowering clients to understand and respond to major industry developments faster than ever before.