Capping a busy first week of public messaging since its pay TV carriage battle started with Disney, DirecTV took the fight to the FCC, filing a "good faith negotiating complaint" against the media conglomerate.
DirecTV claims that at the 11th hour of negotiations, Disney threw a curveball, demanding it to drop any litigation related to the launch of the Disney/Fox/Warner joint venture Venu Sports.
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“Along with these anticompetitive demands, Disney has also insisted that DirecTV agree to a ‘clean slate’ provision and a covenant not to sue, both of which are intended to prevent DirecTV from taking legal action regarding Disney’s anticompetitive demands, which would include filing good faith complaints at the Commission. Not three months ago, however, the Media Bureau made clear that such a demand itself constitutes bad faith," DirecTV said in its FCC filing.
Disney responded with this statement: “We continue to negotiate with DirecTV to restore access to our content as quickly as possible. We urge DirecTV to stop creating diversions and instead prioritize their customers by finalizing a deal that would allow their subscribers to watch our strong upcoming lineup of sports, news and entertainment programming, starting with the return of Monday Night Football.”
Disney channels including ESPN and ABC went dark on the nation's third largest pay TV distributor on Sept. 1. DirecTV has cast the negotiations as a referendum on pay TV's future, demanding that Disney move away from forced network bundling and capitulate to letting skinny bundles of genre-based networks happen.
For their part, it was exactly this kind of bundle that Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery were planning with Venu Sports, before an antitrust suit filed by Fubo -- and backed by DirecTV -- resulted in Venu receiving a preliminary injunction.
