Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- YouTube TV has been having difficulties lately negotiating contract renewals with the companies behind major broadcast and cable channels.
- In addition to NBCUniversal and Disney, YouTube TV reached a stalemate with TelevisaUnivision, resulting in the loss of Univision at the end of September.
- Nearly two months later, Univision channels are finally coming back.
YouTube TV is not in the streaming game to make friends, and that should be perfectly clear from the multiple carriage disputes it’s had with companies in the content game these past few months. There was that public spat with NBCUniversal, and most recently the service dropped Disney-owned channels for a few weeks until a new deal could be worked out. While those have been back for a minute, there’s been another set of channels absent this whole time — and YouTube TV is only now getting around to restoring them.
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This group is slightly more niche than broadcast channels like NBC and ABC, or even cable networks like ESPN — we’re talking about Univision. TelevisaUnivision owns the channels Univision, UNIMÁS, TUDN, and Galavisión, and after a two-month absence, they’re finally returning to YouTube TV (via Deadline).
YouTube TV first picked up those Univision channels back in 2021, offering new Spanish content to the 50-some-million Americans who speak the language. While it certainly has plenty of other Spanish-language content for viewers to enjoy, including a dedicated Spanish Plan, the sheer length of this outage makes it so noteworthy — it was bad enough not having Disney channels for a couple weeks, but imagine what it would be like if that had been going on since the end of September.
While that’s been unfortunate, the good news is that this particular situation shouldn’t be at risk of repeating itself for a good, long while. TelevisaUnivision says that it’s negotiated a “multi-year agreement” with YouTube TV, ensuring viewer access to its channels for a long time to come.
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