ESPN, ABC go dark on DirectTV in feud with Disney, NY Times reports

Disney’s (DIS) channels went dark on DirecTV (T; TPG) on Sunday, leaving millions of subscribers to the satellite TV service without access to marquee networks like ESPN and ABC and cutting off viewership to the U.S. Open tennis tournament, The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin reports. The dispute means that most of DirecTV’s roughly 11 million U.S. subscribers can’t watch ESPN; the ABC broadcast network, which airs the U.S. Open, was also blacked out for many customers. The outage is the latest instance of a routine dispute between a television programming company and its distributor resulting in a service disruption, the author writes.