What the Charter-Disney feud means for sports fans

The carriage dispute that has left Disney-owned channels including ESPN off Charter’s Spectrum service seems like it could take awhile to sort out.

To be sure, there are times in which channels go dark and companies issue sternly-worded statements about each other before their issues get resolved hours later — like what happened with Comcast and NFL Network earlier this year.

The Charter-Disney dispute, however, feels like an existential disagreement rather than haggling over dollars and cents.

What does Charter want?

Charter announced Friday morning what it wants: Disney to make ad-supported versions of Disney+ and Hulu available for free for Spectrum customers, whereas those platforms cost $7.99 each per month direct-to-consumer.

Charter said it would agree to price hikes for Disney’s channels, including ESPN, which had been charging $9.42 per household, if Disney would agree to make their streaming platforms available for free.

“We are either moving forward together with a collaborative business model, or we’re moving on,” Charter said in a statement.

What does Disney want?

In a statement to The Post, Disney said that it has offered Charter “market-based terms” and that the company has “proposed creative ways to make Disney’s direct-to-consumer services available to their Spectrum TV subscribers, including opportunities for new and flexible packages where those services become a focal point of what the consumer might choose.”

The statement continued, “Although Charter claims to value our direct-to-consumer services, they are demanding these services for free as they have stated publicly. Charter is depriving consumers of that content because they are failing to ascribe any value in exchange for licensing those services.     

“Our linear channels and direct-to-consumer services are not one and the same, per Charter’s assertions, but rather complementary products. We continue to invest in original content that premieres exclusively on our linear networks, including live sports, news and appointment viewing programming.”     

What can sports fans do about this it?

ESPN was in about 100 million homes a decade ago and is in about 70 million now, and about a fifth of those are in the Spectrum bundle.

Now, sports fans on Spectrum are left without the US Open and the opening week of college football.

And then, “Monday Night Football” starts after next weekend, and MLB playoffs will also be affected if this drags on long enough.

If you are a die-hard sports fan who has stuck with the cable bundle this long, it’s likely because you relish having access to most relevant live sports, plus being able to switch back and forth between channels easily without having to toggle between apps with loading and buffering time.

Unfortunately, the solutions from here are a bit precarious, and it depends on what region you are in:

– DirecTV Stream carries every relevant national sports network, the Bally Sports RSNs, and YES, MSG and SNY. The one issue here is that DirecTV is in a carriage dispute with Nextstar, which owns these local broadcast networks in a number of regions. All that you would miss in New York, though, is WPIX, which airs a few Mets games a year. It costs $99.99 per month.

– Fubo TV carries every relevant national network except for TBS and TNT. In most areas it carries the regional sports networks — it is one of the only OTT providers to carry the Sinclair-owned Bally Sports RSNs — but it does not carry YES Network. It does, however, carry MSG and SNY on premium tiers. The basic tier is $75 a month and the top tier is $95 a month.

– YouTube TV carries every relevant national sports network except for MLB Network and NHL Network; it does not have the Bally Sports RSNs, YES, MSG or SNY. It costs $72.99 per month plus $10.99 for the extra sports tier.

– Sling TV carries every relevant national sports network but is lacking almost all of the RSNs. It costs $60 a month.

Note that some of these services would require premium tiers to get all of the national sports networks, but at least they carry them.

The reason that Charter has a lot of leverage in this situation is that it has regional monopolies on cable wiring, so even if you decide to drop their pay-TV bundle to continue receiving ESPN, it is likely that you would still wind up subscribed to their broadband services.