fuboTV, TelevisaUnivision Reach Carriage Deal; Channels to Remain on Same Pricing Plans
After what had become a rather contentious negotiation, live TV streaming service fuboTV announced on Friday morning that it had reached a new deal with TelevisaUnivision to keep the company’s Spanish-language channels on the service following the expiration of the previous carriage agreement on June 30.
As is often the case, the new arrangement appears to have happened at the last minute as both sides continued to negotiate right up until the deadline. The new deal means that all Univision-owned channels — Univision, UniMas, Galavision, and TUDN — will remain on the streaming service.
“FuboTV has reached a new agreement with Univision,” the company told The Streamable on Friday. “We are delighted to continue our partnership with the world’s leading Spanish-language media company to bring their popular sports, news and entertainment content to our market-leading Latino package at a reasonable cost to our customers.”
The previous deal — which would have expired at 12 midnight ET on July 1 — made fuboTV the only live TV streamer with the four Univision-owned channels on its base plan and The Streamable has been able to confirm that the channels will remain on the same tiers and at the same price points as part of the new deal.
Both Fubo and TelevisaUnivision had been publicly vocal about the roadblocks in discussions, something that was noticeably out of the ordinary. As the deadline approached, the teams issued dueling Twitter statements blaming the other side for the channels potentially becoming unavailable to subscribers.
While fuboTV had been involved in carriage disputes before, this is the first time that the streamer had discussed the negotiation difficulties in public before having to drop channels. The streamer had frankly discussed the decision not to carry certain channels in the past, but almost always after the fact.
In July 2021, A&E, History, and Lifetime disappeared from fuboTV, but that came without any advanced warning prior to the channels disappearing from the service. The same was true, when fuboTV dropped all of the Turner-owned channels the year prior; something that the company's executives still discuss openly to this day.
Similarly, this isn’t the first carriage dispute between Univision and a streaming service. The Spanish-language channels were dropped from Sling TV in June 2019, and while they reached a deal with Dish nine months later, the channels didn't come back to the streaming service.
Fubo
Fubo is a live TV streaming service with about 90 top channels that start at $79.99 per month. This plan includes local channels, 25 of the top 35 cable channels, and regional sports networks (RSNs). In total, you should expect to pay about $91.99 per month, after adding in their RSN Fee. Fubo was previously known as “fuboTV.”