Disney channels are back on YouTube TV: Talking Tech podcast

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Hey there, listeners. It's Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. If you are a subscriber to YouTube TV, you likely had a fun weekend because you probably woke up on Saturday morning, like I did, and discovered that you no longer had access to Disney channels like National Geographic, ESPN, ABC, FX, all that fun stuff. That's because both YouTube TV and Disney were in the midst of a dispute over an upcoming contract to allow YouTube TV to carry Disney channels. It has now been resolved. My colleagues write about this in a story that you can read on tech.usatoday.com. YouTube TV announced on Sunday that they reached a deal with Disney to restore access to those channels after they had failed to reach a deal by the Friday deadline. At the time that this happened, at the time that YouTube TV lost those channels, the service said that they were going to give people a $15 discount.

So typically, you pay $64.99 a month for YouTube TV. That was going to go down to $49.99 per month. Any Disney recordings that you made previously will return to your YouTube TV library. And if you have a local ABC station, that'll be available as well. Any subscribers who obviously were frustrated by this, I can't blame them. And they started the cancellation process. Parent company Google says that it will honor a one time $15 credit on your bill if you come back and resume your membership before you lose your access. The two companies have been negotiating for a while. And obviously, we had heard YouTube TV talk about this, how channels might go away. Disney said it was optimistic a deal could be reached. Of course, this is all happening with a lot of big stuff happening in sports between the NBA and in college football and everything else.

But again, eventually, we got a deal. And now, everyone with YouTube TV gets those channels back. This is an incident that we thought we got away from. And I've said this before, we thought we were done with this when we got away from cable and we thought, "Oh, here's the brave, new world of streaming. You can go to Netflix. You can go to wherever, and you get everything you want exactly as you want. And it's going to be great." But it turns out the more things seem to change, the more they're staying the same. I still remember back in the day when streaming really first started to take off and there was all this talk about, "You can pick a la carte channels. You can pick the exact channels you want. And you can get all this and this and this."

And now we've gotten to the point where YouTube TV is very similar to what you'd get from a cable package. Really, the biggest difference is you're not having to pay to rent the cable boxes, for example, or any of the extra fees. It's really about as long as you have some device that plays it, whether it's a phone or Roku, whatever, you're set. So that's obviously still a big advantage to YouTube TV. That's why still, I subscribe to YouTube TV personally. That's part of the reason why I've kept it was because I have players for it. I don't have to pay extra for it. Whatever Rokus I've bought to use YouTube TV and everything else has paid for itself. So I'm feeling pretty good. I wish though, that they'd take back all these carriage disputes and pulling my channels away. But I think that's just going to be something we're going to have to get used to, unfortunately.

To read more about this and to read more about YouTube TV and Disney striking a deal, go to tech.usatoday.com. Listeners, let's hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas? Any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter, @BrettMolina23. Please don't forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. Don't forget, if you want tech news delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to the Talking Tech newsletter. It's out every Thursday. Go to newsletters@usa... Newsletters, excuse me, newsletters.usatoday.com. You've been listening to Talking Tech. We'll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.