Key Points
- NBC Universal stopped negotiating with Fubo in early January, Fubo CEO David Gandler said on Tuesday.
- According to Gandler, NBC Universal is satisfied with its Hulu with Live TV deal and won’t restart talks until that contract nears expiration.
- Subscriber churn from the NBC blackout has been “modest” and better than expected, Gandler affirmed, with Fubo and Hulu with Live TV totaling 6.2 million subscribers combined.
Comcast’s NBC Universal stopped negotiating carriage of its channels on Fubo about four weeks after a contract covering its broadcast and cable networks expired, Fubo’s chief executive told investors on Tuesday.
On a conference call following the release of Fubo’s most-recent earnings report, Fubo CEO David Gandler said negotiators from NBC Universal walked away from the table in early January and has been unwilling to restart discussions that would open the door for Fubo to begin offering the channels once again.
NBC Universal channels have been unavailable to Fubo subscribers since late November, when a distribution contract expired with no new agreement in place. The matter also affected cable networks that Comcast owned until last month, when they were spun out into a separate business called Versant. NBC Universal continues to negotiate pay TV carriage of Versant’s channels on its behalf.
According to Gandler, NBC Universal executives “are satisfied” with a distribution contract that allows Disney’s Hulu with Live TV to offer NBC Universal and Versant’s broadcast and cable networks. Fubo and Disney merged their pay TV businesses in October, bringing Fubo and Hulu with Live TV under common ownership.
“Comcast indicated that they are satisfied with their existing Hulu Live arrangement and do not intend to engage in renewal discussions on the (Fubo) side at this time, preferring to reengage closer to the Hulu Live expiration,” Gandler said. “Given that most commercial terms had been largely aligned prior to the spin-off, this position is very difficult to reconcile.”
NBC Universal executives are not willing to restart discussions involving Fubo until Hulu with Live TV’s distribution contract is close to expiring, Gandler affirmed.
A Comcast spokesperson has not yet returned an e-mail seeking confirmation of Gandler’s assertions and further comment on the matter.
Stock Price
The prolonged disruption means Fubo customers will likely have to look for an alternative service to watch upcoming sports events like Super Bowl LX and the Winter Olympic Games, which air on NBC this year, and the Spanish broadcast FIFA World Cup men’s soccer tournament from Telemundo.
For weeks, Fubo has pointed subscribers to Peacock as an alternative way to watch NBC Sports programming over the Internet; Fubo sells access to Peacock through an affiliate program, The Desk reported last year. Other services, including DIRECTV and YouTube TV, offer channels from NBC Universal and Versant.
Gandler said subscriber churn influenced by the loss of NBC has been “modest” and “better than our expectations,” but it is hard for Wall Street to gauge that on their own, since the company won’t report breakout figures for Fubo and Hulu with Live TV.
Instead, Fubo has combined the subscriber count of the two services — the company has 6.2 million subscribers across Fubo and Hulu with Live TV, of which 6 million are based in North America.
“Obviously, going forward, we’re not going to separate out the numbers for Hulu Live and Fubo TV,” Gandler said on Tuesday. But he affirmed that Hulu with Live TV has benefitted from the situation involving Fubo and NBC, and that Fubo was able to convince some subscribers to make lateral moves from one service to the other in order to continue watching NBC’s broadcast and cable sports programming, a statement that couldn’t be independently verified.
“We were down 3 percent year-over-year versus the prior year in subscribers, despite the fact that we were down with NBC for, I believe, over four weeks,” Gandler said. “So, it speaks to the quality of the team, our ability to market on platform and to really understand the type of consumers we have.”
