The streaming wars just claimed their biggest casualty yet. Disney yanked more than 20 channels including ABC and ESPN from YouTube TV Thursday night after contract talks with Google collapsed, leaving millions of cord-cutters in the dark just as college football playoffs heat up. The blackout highlights how traditional media giants are weaponizing content to extract higher fees from digital platforms.
The gloves are off between Google and Disney in what's shaping up as the most significant streaming distribution fight of 2025. Disney's content library - from ABC's primetime lineup to ESPN's college football coverage - vanished from YouTube TV at 11:59 PM ET Thursday after the media giant and Google failed to hammer out a new carriage deal.
"Last week Disney used the threat of a blackout on YouTube TV as a negotiating tactic to force deal terms that would raise prices on our customers," Google fired back in a blog post that didn't mince words. The tech giant accused Disney of "directly harming subscribers while benefiting their own live TV products, including Hulu + Live TV and Fubo."
The timing couldn't be worse for YouTube TV's subscriber base. College football is heating up toward playoff season, and ABC carries some of the biggest games. Disney's ESPN networks remain the crown jewel of sports programming, making this blackout particularly painful for sports fans who ditched cable specifically to avoid these kinds of disputes.
YouTube TV has become America's streaming heavyweight, capturing over 13% of total TV viewing time as of July, according to Nielsen data. That massive reach gives Google significant leverage, but Disney isn't backing down from what sources describe as demands for substantially higher per-subscriber fees.
This isn't Google's first rodeo with carriage disputes. Just last month, YouTube TV nearly lost NBCUniversal channels before both sides agreed to a temporary extension that averted disaster. But Disney appears unwilling to blink, potentially calculating that the pain of losing YouTube TV's audience is worth establishing a precedent for higher streaming rates across the industry.
