At long last, the partnership between ESPN and YouTube TV has reached its final form.
About 10 months since Disney and YouTube TV finalized a new distribution agreement following fraught negotiations that kept Disney-owned networks blacked out on YouTube TV for weeks during the heart of football season, the moment YouTube TV subscribers have all been waiting for has finally arrived.
On Tuesday, YouTube TV and ESPN rolled out “ingestion” of app-exclusive ESPN content onto YouTube TV. Now, YouTube TV subscribers can access all live ESPN events, including those that are not scheduled for one of ESPN’s linear networks, directly within the YouTube TV app.
YouTube TV users will now be greeted with three additional rows of live ESPN events directly within their channel guide, with a fourth row that users can click into to view every other live ESPN event not presented in the first three rows.
News of the new feature comes just weeks after ESPN formally rolled out authentication for YouTube TV subscribers, which allowed users to sign into the ESPN app with their YouTube TV credentials and access the full suite of ESPN Unlimited content. Before then, YouTube TV users were only able to access ESPN’s linear networks.
The full integration of ESPN into YouTube TV will eliminate any need for YouTube TV users to launch the ESPN app to access live events or shows; even library content like 30 for 30 now lives directly inside YouTube TV. That level of integration was a major sticking point during negotiations between Disney and YouTube TV as media companies fight to keep users on their own platform and within their own ecosystem.
Giving YouTube TV the keys to hold ESPN content within its platform was a major concession for Disney during last year’s negotiations and means that the over 10 million people that subscribe to YouTube TV will have little reason to ever launch the ESPN app. Not only does that mean people will be spending more time on YouTube TV’s platform and not ESPN’s, but it creates a barrier between ESPN and its audience. There’s immense value for media companies in knowing the consumption habits and tendencies of their viewers, and ESPN will no longer have that for a subset of its audience.
For YouTube TV subscribers, the change is welcome and overdue. Aggregating all of ESPN’s content in one place alongside every other linear network creates a more frictionless experience for sports fans, who frequently want to flip channels or throw games into a multiview. And with the US Open well underway and college football season beginning in earnest this week, the feature comes just in time for sports fans to make the most of it.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.