What’s the latest on genre-specific channel packs from DIRECTV?
What’s the latest on genre-specific channel packs from DIRECTV?
The satellite company is still planning to bring smaller, themed channel bundles to market in the first half of 2025.
There are likely some congratulatory handshakes being passed around DIRECTV headquarters today. Just one day after the satellite company and competitor/former merger partner Echostar issued letters to the judge overseeing Venu Sports’ antitrust case, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced that their sports-focused streaming joint venture will not be moving forward. With the sports-focused skinny bundle now really most sincerely dead, attention is turning to DIRECTV’s promised launch of smaller, genre-specific channel packages as ways for cord-cutters to get the specific channels they want without having to pay for the ones they don’t.
Key Details:
- Slimmed-down channel bundles from DIRECTV are coming in the first half of 2025.
- The company is likely to ask for participation from other channel owners like Fox and WBD in its smaller plans.
- DIRECTV is planning a sports plan, as well as packages centering on entertainment and kids and family programming.
When negotiating its new carriage deal with Disney in August and September 2024, DIRECTV held firm on demands that it be allowed to create smaller channel plans with specific themes, similar to the structure of Venu Sports. That led to a short-term blackout of Disney channels on the company’s satellite and streaming services, but eventually Disney acquiesced and granted the distributor permission to make smaller plans using its channels, including ABC, Disney Channel, ESPN, Freeform, National Geographic, and more.
When the new carriage deal between the two sides was announced, DIRECTV said it planned to have those new packages available in the first half of 2025. While a DIRECTV spokesperson confirmed to The Streamable that the timeline was still in place, things have been fairly quiet regarding the new channel packages since September.
Current and potential customers who are hoping to subscribe to DIRECTV’s smaller channel bundles shouldn’t be worried by the radio silence. It takes time to bring such new products to market; for one thing, DIRECTV will almost certainly want to bring new programmers like Fox and WBD into the fold at some point in order to include channels like FS1 and TNT in its sports-specific plan, especially now that Venu has been consigned to the scrap heap.
To do so would likely require new carriage agreements, such as the one DIRECTV struck with Disney last year. Those negotiations can be fraught, and allowing them to play out in front of the public usually only leads to frustration for customers. DIRECTV might be in the midst of such discussions with other programmers even now, but new deals don’t materialize overnight, especially when they require such dramatic shifts in philosophy. For generations, channel owners have been accustomed to forcing distributors to pay for bundles of channels that include their less popular networks in order to get the really good ones. While that is still the case to certain degrees, the rigidity of those deals has lessened.
DIRECTV will have a competitor in the space when it is ready to offer its themed channel plans to consumers. Fubo and Hulu + Live TV announced earlier this week that they plan to merge, and as part of the transaction Fubo too will be allowed to create a new streaming service with fewer channels that carries ESPN and other Disney-owned networks. DIRECTV isn’t only looking to craft a sports package, though; it also has designs on a plan focused on entertainment-themed channels, and another built around kids and family programming.
So, viewers who are hoping that DIRECTV’s smaller channel packages will save them from a bloated cable plan packed with networks they don’t watch can rest easy. There haven’t been many public updates from DIRECTV since it won the right to create such plans, but they’re still on the way.
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