Copyright Men's Journal
YouTube TV subscribers missed yet another weekend of sports action and are expected to miss Monday night’s showdown between the Green Bay Packers and the Philadelphia Eagles as a result of a carriage dispute with Disney, the parent company of ESPN and ABC. The dispute has been ongoing since Oct. 30, forcing YouTube TV subscribers to miss two weekends of college football, the opening week of college basketball, early-season NBA games, and two Monday Night Football games. As a result, YouTube TV has issued all of its subscribers a $20 credit, but there’s a bit of a catch. YouTube TV Offering Credit to Customers Since the start of its dispute with Disney, which has resulted in ABC and ESPN being removed from the streaming service, YouTube TV indicated that it would offer customers a $20 credit if the standoff resulted in an extended outage. On Sunday, YouTube TV officially followed through on that promise. “Over the next few days, you will receive a follow-up email with instructions on how to redeem your $20 credit for YouTube TV. Once redeemed, this will be applied to your next bill,” YouTube TV wrote in an email to subscribers on Sunday evening. Given that the base plan for YouTube TV costs $82.99 plus tax per month, the $20 credit works out to be about a 25% discount off the monthly price as a result of the missing channels. You Have to ‘Claim’ Your $20 Credit While YouTube TV is indeed offering a $20 credit to its customers as a result of the carriage dispute, there is one small catch. The $20 credit will not be automatically added to each customer’s bill. Instead, each customer will have to follow the instructions provided in an email and “claim” their credit. In order to find the credit, customers were required to go to the settings and find it under the “update” tab. The Move Sparked Outrage The decision to force users to “claim” the credit instead of applying it to everyone quickly sparked outrage amongst prominent voices in sports. Mike Florio, the owner of Pro Football Talk, did not hold back as he blasted YouTube TV with some rather scathing comments. “It is — and I say this with full appreciation of the fact that YouTube and its parent company, Google, and its parent company, Alphabet, are a multi-trillion-dollar conglomerate — bull[expletive]. They’re adding an obstacle knowing that some people won’t realize that the credit has to be claimed, won’t know how to do it, won’t have the time to do it, or will forget to do it,” Florio wrote for Pro Football Talk. Florio was certainly not the only one. “Unbelievable. YouTube TV is making people manually claim their $20 credit rather than automatically deduct it from their bill. So for the people who don’t click the link and claim the credit you’re just going to take their money for ESPN/Disney and pocket that? Losing respect for everyone involved with this dispute,” prominent LSU Tigers writer Preston Guy wrote in a post on X. “PSA: YouTube TV subscribers will need to redeem this credit themselves, rather than having it automatically applied to their accounts,” Awful Announcing, a prominent website covering sports media, wrote in a post on X. The replies to those posts were filled with hundreds of others expressing their own frustration at the move from YouTube TV. While it’s certainly appreciated that YouTube TV is offering its customers a credit, it sparked outrage by not simply applying this credit to everyone’s account.
