Ten million YouTube TV subscribers are two lost weekends into the standoff between the streaming service and Disney over access to ABC, ESPN and its related networks.
That means two lost “Monday Night Football” games, two lost college football Saturdays and countless other smaller games of interest to a subscriber.
YouTube TV has offered a $20 credit to its subscribers. The catch: It isn’t automatically applied to your account — you have to log into your account to claim it.
The good news: That process is straightforward.
• Go to tv.youtube.com and log in.
• Go to your account (click on that logo of your face or initial in the top right).
• Click on “Settings.”
• On the left-hand side of that page, there is a list.
• Scroll down to the bottom and look for “Updates.” Click on “Updates.”
• You should see a blue button, “Claim Credit.” Click that.
• You should see a message that your credit has been applied.
Timing on a resolution to this impasse isn’t clear — missing a primetime NFL game (let alone two) is typically enough of a threat to get Disney and its distribution partners to a deal.
However, YouTube TV isn’t your typical cable company. It is backed by Alphabet (originally Google, before a rebrand for the holding company), a tech juggernaut whose business interest in streaming TV is a tiny slice of a $3 trillion market cap.
The key sticking point? How much YouTube TV will pay ESPN per subscriber for that content.
(And, baked into that, how much YouTube TV will pay relative to its cable competitors, who are larger than YouTube TV for now but project to be eclipsed by YouTube TV over the rest of the decade.)
As The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand has pointed out, YouTube TV needs ESPN to be a viable streaming service. ESPN needs access to YouTube TV’s 10 million subscribers and the reliability of a per-month payment for ESPN’s content over the next few years.
Both sides have incentives to get this done. Then again, they had those same incentives two weeks ago, and all YouTube TV’s sports fans are left with are inaccessible big football games and a newly accessible $20 credit.