ESPN Is Back, but YouTube TV Still Owes You $20
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In an effort to do right by customers during its standoff with Disney — a dispute that finally ended on Friday — YouTube TV is offering subscribers a $20 credit to help soften the blow of losing ESPN and other Disney-owned channels. The deal may be finalized, but the way it unfolded still raises questions worth talking about.
If you’re a sports fan with YouTube TV, you began feeling the pain on October 30, when Disney pulled all its properties from the service over a fee dispute, including Disney-owned ESPN. For many, missing two weeks of Monday Night Football was tough to digest. It’s football season, the sun is setting early, and we work long days. Apparently, $82.99/month for the convenience of Monday Night Football and SportsCenter from your living room is too much to ask for.
If you were a YouTube TV subscriber during the blackout, you can still claim your credit until December 9 — regardless of whether you’re a sports fan. There are nearly 10 million YouTube TV subscribers. If we all claim the credit, that’s a $200 million hit to YouTube TV’s bottom line.
Logically, if a standoff like this doesn’t hurt its wallet, there’s little motivation for these disputes to get resolved. Encouraging YouTube TV subscribers to claim their credit shouldn’t be viewed as absolving Disney from any blame. It’s simply the most direct recourse available to subscribers.
On November 9th, I received the above email from YouTube TV, advising me that a credit was on the way, but I had to take specific action for the credit to be applied to my account. Immediately, I wondered why YouTube TV couldn’t or wouldn’t automatically apply the credit, and whether we’d have seen a credit for every month if the dispute had dragged on longer.
A couple of days later, I received an email from YouTube TV with instructions on how to claim the credit. It’s a simple action: go to tv.youtube.com, click your profile icon, go to Settings, and then click Updates to find a Claim Credit button.
Even so, I was still left wondering why it was up to me to redeem the credit, and whether YouTube would’ve offered credits month after month if the dispute had continued. I followed the reminder in the email that stated, “…family managers have the ability to pause or cancel…” accounts anytime, and I paused my account after claiming the credit.
During the two-week blackout, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in reevaluating if YouTube TV made sense for me or if I’d be better off paying for an ESPN Select ($11.99/month) or ESPN Unlimited Plan ($29.99/month) instead. In case you were wondering, Disney+ subscribers don’t automatically get ESPN, either. You still need a linked ESPN subscription or the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundle, which starts at $29.99/month for the year and renews at $35.99/month.
If you’re a YouTube TV subscriber primarily for sports and also subscribe to Disney+, one of these options could still be a good fit for you. However, at the time it felt like I’d be letting Disney win by handing them more money and giving up the network news and entertainment channels I was happy to get with YouTube TV when I cut the cord with my cable company.
Dollar savings aside, it still felt like a compromise — a choice between overpaying for one service or overpaying for another. And frankly, even with the channels restored, that tension hasn’t gone away. The whole ordeal is a reminder of how little leverage customers have when billion-dollar companies decide to play chicken. The standoff is over, and customers have won — at least on paper — but YouTube TV is still making you manually claim the credit you’re owed for the blackout — and that’s still one of the few ways we can express our frustration in a way that hits the bottom line.
