That's kind of it. Including Disney's streaming packages for cable subscribers is a significant and unprecedented give. But this is not a groundbreaking deal. It's an incremental deal suggestive of a slow-moving landscape where media companies aren't yet ready to let go of cable, a declining multibillion dollar cash generating behemoth.
The sides got a deal done in time for cable customers to watch"Monday Night Football" on ESPN for Week 1, which has always been the primary deadline on carriage deals for decades. Charter customers didn't get to watch the U.S. Open tennis finals this weekend.
Instead, media executive rhetoric won the day. Carriage disputes between pay-TV providers and networks are old hat. It's become standard procedure for executives of pay-TV companies and programmers to rage at each other in strongly worded statements where distributors talk about the rising cost of cable and media companies counter with the importance of their content. In recent years, media journalists have largely caught on and haven't taken the bait.
This deal was different because Winfrey said it was different. He held an investor call the day after Charter and Disney didn't reach a deal, an unusual move signaling that maybe Charter was content to start moving away from the linear cable TV business – something that then-Cablevision CEO Jim Dolan