For the better part of cable’s existence, there have been carriage fights. Distributors (such as Comcast) and networks (such as ESPN) fight over the terms to put a channel on TV, blaming each other for whatever impasse arises. And then, when the NFL is on the line, suddenly the two sides find their way to a deal.

The fight is about money, of course. ESPN has spent billions of dollars on live sports broadcast rights (mainly the NFL, college football and the NBA) in recent years, so it needs to charge distributors more to cash in on those investments. That’s especially true as cord-cutting means fewer homes overall pay for TV.

YouTube TV, naturally, wants to pay less. It also has asked Disney, which has always sold its networks as a bundle, to allow it to carry some but not all of them. Why should it be forced to pay for, say, National Geographic and Freeform when it really wants ABC and ESPN?

But there is a new wrinkle to the wrangling here: YouTube TV is owned by tech behemoth Google. The service, which now costs more than $80 per month, is the fastest-growing TV distributor with around 10 million subscribers, and it is on pace to be the largest pay TV distributor as early as next year, surpassing DirecTV and Comcast. It has the market power to challenge the way Disney does business.

In addition to cost, YouTube TV is making an argument about how it would like to deliver ESPN to its subscribers.

ESPN, for example, has launched a stand-alone app and Disney has made ESPN available on skinnier bundles on platforms that it owns, including Hulu and Fubo. YouTube TV wants similar flexibility, possibly to sell ESPN as part of its own sports bundle or to offer all of the bells and whistles of ESPN’s app within YouTube TV.

“They want to have a one-stop shop where you can watch everything sports in one place,” Rich Greenfield, founder of media and technology investment firm LightShed Partners, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this week. “That obviously isn’t great for anyone with a stand-alone sports application like ESPN.”

In these disputes, content used to be king. When football fans started clamoring for their NFL games, distributors usually folded. But there was a reason for that: Comcast’s cable business is dependent on having millions of cable subscribers.

Google is not a cable company. The revenue from YouTube TV is just a small fraction of its business. ESPN can try to direct fans to its app ($30 per month), but the loss of distribution revenue from YouTube TV would be far more meaningful to its bottom line. (According to research firm S&P Global, Disney netted an average of $10.08 per ESPN cable subscriber in 2024.)

But Patrick Crakes, a former Fox Sports executive turned industry consultant, said that would be shortsighted for Google.

“If Google wanted to, they could just pay for every single Disney channel and keep the price for YouTube TV low,” he said. “They’d materially impact all the other pay TV distributors over the next couple years. Yes, they’d lose money on a cost accounting basis, but they’d roll up the business. But they don’t do that. Instead, they seem to want to run the YouTube TV business to try and break even, which is baffling.”

Greenfield and Crakes predicted the two sides would come to an agreement soon. But the contours for the next generation of carriage fights have been drawn. And in the meantime, millions of fans are locked out of their favorite sports and scrambling to find alternative viewing options.