Posted in: ABC, Freeform, Opinion, streaming, TV, TV | Tagged: ABC, charter, disney, espn, freeform

Disney, Charter Play Nice, Cut New Deal; ESPN, ABC Return to Spectrum

With only hours before ESPN's Monday Night Football was set to kick off, Disney & Charter have reportedly agreed on a new carriage deal.

Was it the power of ESPN's Monday Night Football that compelled them? We may never know for sure, but the good news we have to pass along is that media giants Disney and Charter have reportedly agreed to play nice with one another – cementing that promise with a new deal. What does that mean? That means that Disney networks like ESPN, ABC, Freeform, and others will be returning to the screens of Charter's nearly 15 million Spectrum cable subscribers. Of course, the timing of the news couldn't come at a better time for football fans – with MNF making its return tonight. Of course, it's also good news for The Mouse because a lot of money gets paid for those NFL rights – so you want those games in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Though no official comments or details were released at the time of this writing, the new deal would put to rest a particularly nasty standoff between the mega cable provider and The Mouse, one that saw Disney pulling its networks just as college & NFL seasons were getting underway. With Charter running in New York City and Los Angeles, you could see how that could be problematic for a lot of folks.

In the short term, that's great news for viewers – especially NFL fans. But the dispute doesn't appear to be a "unicorn" so much as a sign of things to come as streaming continues to grow and more content is pushed in that direction. With Charter, you had the cable television powerhouse making the argument that it shouldn't have to pay higher rates for Disney's set of cable networks when it was seeing a decrease in subscribers on the cable front. If Disney was going to ask for Charter to pay more, then the cable company pushed to have Disney+ for free for Spectrum subscribers – a proposal that the folks over at The Mouse weren't reportedly too thrilled with.

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