DIRECTV’s Genre Packs are giving power to the people
DIRECTV’s Genre Packs are giving power to the people
Genre Packs are the closest thing to a la carte cable viewing we’ve gotten yet, and they are already changing the face of the industry.
When DIRECTV first entered into its carriage dispute with Disney in September 2024, many of the company’s customers could be forgiven for wanting the satellite and live TV streaming company to cave to the House of Mouse’s demands immediately. At the time, that dispute threatened viewer access to NFL and college football games on ABC and ESPN at the start of a new season, as well as plenty of other programming across Disney’s channels. But DIRECTV held firm, and not only were Disney-owned channels eventually restored, but in the negotiations DIRECTV earned the right to do what no other pay-TV distributor had done: use Disney’s channels to create smaller, genre-themed channel packages. A year later, DIRECTV’s Genre Packs are widely available, and they are empowering viewers as no other recent pay-TV product has done.
Key Details:
- The choice is yours: There are multiple DIRECTV Genre Packs, all of which come with a month-to-month contract.
- Needed changes: Venu Sports may have been killed, but it shook up the pay-TV world in a needed way.
- Toward the future: DIRECTV Genre Packs have prompted other providers to start creating their own genre channel plans.
The MySports Genre Pack was the first category-specific plan that DIRECTV launched, rolling out in two dozen markets in January. Now, DIRECTV has launched the MyEntertainment, MyKids, MyNews, and MiEspañol plans, which, alongside MySports, are available essentially everywhere in the United States. These plans range in price from $20 to $70 per month — much less than standard cable and live streaming channel packages that can run $100 per month or more — and can be streamed from the DIRECTV app on an ever-expanding list of popular streaming devices and smart TVs.
Like other live TV streaming products, DIRECTV Genre Packs don’t have long-term contracts. Viewers get to stay month-to-month with DIRECTV, so no one will ever be locked into a one or two-year contract that will see them paying hundreds of dollars to cancel if they want to move on to a plan that fits their needs better. The choice is yours with DIRECTV Genre Packs; sign up when you want, and cancel whenever the mood strikes you as well.
That’s a huge benefit for people, but the customer-friendly advancements introduced by Genre Packs go beyond flexible contracts. In reality, Genre Packs are just about the closest viewers have ever gotten to a true à la carte experience, which allows consumers to sign up for only the individual channels that they are interested in. DIRECTV Genre Packs let viewers pay for what they want to watch, and skip paying for the things they have no interest in.
It’s important to recognize that without the failed Venu Sports experiment, DIRECTV Genre Packs might never have existed. To be sure, distributors like DIRECTV have been asking programmers for permission to create category-specific packages for a long time, but the idea was a non-starter for channel owners. Then, in February 2024, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery decided to try to skip the middleman and offer a sports-only package comprised of channels like ESPN, FS1, and TNT directly to consumers that they eventually named Venu Sports.
Fubo launched an immediate lawsuit against Venu, on the grounds that it violated antitrust laws. DIRECTV enthusiastically supported Fubo’s efforts to scuttle Venu Sports. The joint venture suffered several setbacks in court, and in the midst of that battle, Disney gave the go-ahead to DIRECTV to begin creating Genre Packs at long last. Almost certainly, Disney saw the writing on the wall that Venu was going nowhere as of September 2024, and in January, it joined with Fox and WBD to to announce that Venu had been canceled.
However, Genre Packs remained, and I believe that they have the power to change the entire pay-TV industry, and they’ve come just in time. The attempted launch of Venu seems to have awoken executives at distribution companies like DIRECTV to the power that they hold, even if the dominance of linear TV is waning. And since the landscape of traditional TV is changing dramatically, it has become incumbent on the distributors to continually evolve their businesses to stay viable. It’s been quite a while since a product as monumentally different than the traditional channel package has become available to customers, and the failure of Venu seems to have clued distributors into the fact that they need to make drastic changes.
This has vast implications for the future of pay-TV, and we’re already seeing that come to fruition. Fubo recently launched a sports-only option, and Sling TV now has short-term passes that let viewers sign up for as little as $5 per day to stream some channels, a clear indication that streamers are trying to flex their own creative muscles after seeing what DIRECTV has done. I’m certain other companies will continue to see DIRECTV Genre Packs as an opportunity to evolve their own offerings to provide more creative and cheaper plans in the future.
DIRECTV has also embraced on-demand streaming, breaking a pattern of hostility between pay-TV providers and on-demand streaming services that was longstanding until Charter Communications began including Disney streaming services with its cable plans in 2023. DIRECTV’s MyKids package comes with Disney+ at no extra charge, and the MySports plan offers the ESPN Unlimited streaming service free. The MyEntertainment plan is the best proposition in this regard, coming with Disney+, Hulu, and HBO Max, all of which are included in the base streaming package.
That, too, could quickly become a trend. For years, on-demand streamers and pay-TV danced around each other uncomfortably, and many times the relationship became adversarial as streamers tried to paint a picture of pay-TV and streaming as an either/or proposition, positioning themselves as the much cheaper — and therefore, better — option. In 2025, however, streaming and pay TV are realizing they’re better off together, and DIRECTV Genre Packs are helping to foster that relationship in a precedent-setting way that will surely convince other distributors to bundle streamers with their plans going forward.
DIRECTV Genre Packs still don’t allow customers to pick and choose each and every individual network in their plans, but they represent a huge step forward for consumers nonetheless. They put the power of choice and flexibility in people’s hands, and they are almost certain to serve as examples for other distributors who would rather create cheaper products like Genre Packs than see customers continue to desert en masse in favor of cheaper TV options.
DIRECTV
DIRECTV is one of The Streamable’s top choices for the best live TV streaming service overall in 2026, especially for users who want the most channels or want to watch the most live sports. With an unbeatable lineup of local, news, sports, and entertainment channels, three main signature packages, an unlimited DVR, and 20 simultaneous streams at home, DIRECTV remains a premier choice for any cord-cutter.