Google’s YouTube TV and NBCUniversal announced Saturday that they had finalized a new carriage agreement that will keep 14 NBCUniversal television channels — including NBC, MSNBC, Bravo, E! and Telemundo — available to YouTube TV subscribers, reports The L-A Times.
We’re thrilled to share that we’ve reached a deal with NBCUniversal to continue carrying the full NBCUniversal portfolio of channels, including their Regional Sports Networks and your local NBC station. That means you won’t lose access to any of their channels, and YouTube TV will continue to offer 85+ networks for $64.99* per month.
We appreciate NBCUniversal’s willingness to work toward an agreement, and we also appreciate your patience while we negotiated with them on your behalf. Thanks again for being a YouTube TV member.
Sincerely,
The YouTube TV team
The deal averts a blackout of such shows as “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” on Bravo, “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC and NBC’s “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon,” “NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt” and “Sunday Night Football.”
The two sides had been facing a Thursday night deadline to hammer out a new distribution pact, and earlier in the week, the two companies alerted consumers about a possible blackout. Amid the public messaging campaign, there was a breakthrough in the talks, and NBCUniversal said Thursday night that it had granted a short-term extension in the original deadline.
Earlier in the week it appeared that YouTube TV might lose the legal rights to carry the channels owned by NBCUniversal, including regional sports channels and NBC network-affiliated stations. Google, which owns YouTube TV, had been balking at NBCUniversal’s demands for higher fees.
The two sides did not disclose terms of the new carriage deal Saturday.
The skirmish between the two media giants is the latest flare-up in the television industry’s long-running carriage fee wars.
An outage of NBCUniversal channels on YouTube TV would have been a major disruption for subscribers to the popular 4-year-old linear channel service, which has about 4 million subscribers, according to analysts’ estimates.
Amid a migration of traditional subscribers, television channel owners, including NBCUniversal, have been raising the fees they charge distributors in an effort to keep their TV channels highly profitable. These companies argue that programming costs, particularly for sports, have skyrocketed — and they need to increase revenue to cover rising expenses.
But TV distributors in recent years have bristled at the constant fee increases, arguing that TV programmers are making a difficult situation even worse by contributing to the escalating subscription fees that irritate consumers. The distributors have claimed the programmers are inadvertently helping to chase away valuable customers.
“The prevalence of cord-cutting in the U.S. and the persistent decline in cable network viewership complicate carriage agreements,” analysts with the research firm S&P Global Market Intelligence wrote in a September report. “Traditional multichannel operators face weakening demand due to the rise of over-the-top platforms, but cable programmers continue to ask for affiliate rate hikes to keep their linear businesses afloat.”
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