LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dish Network and Disney have reached a
landmark deal that envisions the day when Dish will offer a
Netflix-like TV service to people who’d rather stream TV over the
Internet than put a satellite receiver on their roof.
The deal
announced late Monday paves the way for Dish to offer live local
broadcasts from ABC TV stations and programming from ABC Family, Disney
Channel, ESPN and ESPN2 over mobile devices, set-top boxes and other
means, similar to how Netflix’s video streams are delivered today.
No
start date for such a service was announced. It is likely that Dish
will have to cut similar deals with other programmers to make such a
service attractive. A Dish spokesman refused to speculate on what the
offering would cost.
As part of the new rights deal, Dish Network
Corp. agreed to disable — for three days after the initial broadcast — a
function on its Hopper digital video recorders that allows people to
automatically record and strip out commercials from prime-time weeknight
programming. But that’s only for programs on ABC, which is owned by The
Walt Disney Co.
Dish CEO Joseph Clayton said in a statement the deal was "about predicting the future of
television."
Anne
Sweeney, co-chairman of Disney Media Networks, said in a statement that
both Disney CEO Bob Iger and Dish’s majority shareholder, Charlie
Ergen, were directly involved in carving out "one of the most complex
and comprehensive" deals ever.
"We planned for the evolution of our industry," she said.
With
the deal, both sides are dropping a legal battle between them over the
so-called AutoHop function, which had threatened to cut into the revenue
of media companies like Disney by stripping out ads. Dish hasn’t made
public how many of its 14 million subscribers use the Hopper.
Dish
customers will also gain access for the first time to Disney’s
WatchESPN, Watch Disney, Watch ABC Family and Watch ABC apps, which
allow for live and on-demand program viewing on mobile devices in or out
of the home.
Dish is also picking up a slew of new channels
including Disney Junior, Fusion, ESPN Goal Line, Longhorn Network and
the upcoming SEC ESPN Network when it launches sometime this fall. It
also gains more access to more on-demand Disney programming.
The
companies said they would work together on new advertising models. Last
month, Dish announced a technology partnership with rival satellite TV
company DirecTV to launch a system that helps target political ads to
viewers based on where they live.
Dish and Disney said they are
looking at dynamically inserting ads into programming based on viewer
data, developing new ways of advertising on mobile devices, and
measuring viewing for longer than the current industry standard that
includes the live broadcast plus three days of DVR viewing.
The
two sides have been quietly negotiating a new deal since before the last
one expired at the end of September, deftly avoiding a signal blackout
like the one between CBS Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. last August
that caused massive subscriber defections.
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