After some U.S. Open players made a racket about being blocked from watching the tennis tournament during the Disney-Spectrum cable dispute, ESPN has offered a temporary solution: giving away access to the company’s internal app.
ESPN and several other Disney-owned channels recently went dark on Charter Spectrum after the two companies could not come to terms on a broadcasting fees contract, resulting in nearly 15 million cable users losing out on the ESPN family of channels. And this week, those blacked out channels are broadcasting college football, the NFL and the U.S. Open.
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And some U.S. Open players, including Daniil Medvedev and Coco Gauff, have publicly complained that they couldn’t scout the tournament and watch other matches from their hotel rooms due to the blackout.
“I don’t know if it’s legal or illegal, but I have to find a way, because I cannot watch on TV anymore,” Medvedev told reporters about trying to get access to ESPN. “So, I have the internet and these pirate websites, so I watch tennis there. I have no other choice.”
“I’m not gonna get into that, but we can’t watch ESPN at our hotel. I saw the scoreline. I didn’t see the match,” Gauff chimed in about the blackout this week.
So on Tuesday, an ESPN spokesperson told the Financial Times that the company has since offered U.S. Open players special access to Disney’s internal app for free in their hotel rooms in order to watch their opponents play.
The Disney
DIS,
blackout began on Aug. 31 for Spectrum
CHTR,
cable customers, and was ongoing as of Wednesday evening.
In addition to ESPN, blacked-out channels on Spectrum include, ESPN2, SEC Network, ACC Network, ESPNU, ABC-owned stations, Disney-branded channels, Freeform, FX and National Geographic.
Interested customers who are, alas, not skilled enough at tennis to qualify for the U.S. Open still have a few other options to get ESPN or the Disney family of channels in the meantime. In addition to possibly changing cable providers, whose availability varies by location, streaming platforms such as Google’s
GOOG,
YouTubeTV, FuboTV
FUBO,
and SlingTV all carry the ESPN group of channels for between $40 to $75 a month.
Read on: Want to watch every NFL game without cable this season? Here’s how much it will cost you.
The news comes as reports have swirled over the last year that Disney is looking to spin off ESPN into its own streaming service. But when asked during an August conference call about a possible ESPN sale, Disney CEO Bob Iger said he would not “speculate” on the sale of any Disney assets.
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