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ABC Affiliates Are Unhappy With Disney’s Plan to Put Super Bowl LXI on ESPN, Disney+ and Four Alt-Casts

Aaron Harme

ABC’s local affiliates, the locally owned stations that carry ABC’s shows, are unhappy with Disney’s plan to carry Super Bowl LXI on ABC, ESPN and Disney+ plus four alternate broadcasts, CNBC’s Alex Sherman reported Thursday. One station group CEO, who asked not to be named because the data is private, estimates the split could cut the game’s broadcast-linked ad revenue by up to 35% from last year.

The game is Feb. 14, and it is ESPN’s first Super Bowl production. Every U.S. Disney+ subscriber can stream the main telecast. ESPN2 gets the Manning brothers’ ManningCast, ESPNU gets a version with The Pat McAfee Show, NFL Network gets one built on Next Gen Stats, and a “Star Wars”-themed version runs on Disney Channel, Disney XD and Disney+ with no commercials at all. ABC hasn’t aired a Super Bowl since 2006.

Each station pays Disney for that programming, a payment the industry calls a reverse retransmission fee, and in return it sells some of the commercial breaks to local advertisers. As CNBC describes the process, Disney pays billions for live sports and then asks its affiliates for money to help pay for them. Disney’s latest annual report counts fees from about 245 affiliated stations as revenue without giving a dollar figure. Scripps, which owns 18 ABC affiliates, says in its own annual report that its network fees are fixed amounts plus, in some deals, a share of what cable and satellite companies pay it.

A person familiar told CNBC the game brings in about 3% of a typical affiliate’s annual ad revenue in a year it airs on that station, and big-market stations the networks own typically take in about $10 million from it. Gray Media’s annual report shows $18 million of Super Bowl ad revenue across its 54 CBS channels in 2024 and $9 million across its 27 FOX channels in 2025. Both come to about $333,000 a channel, by my math. ABC channels make up about 11% of Gray’s revenue.

Disney+ has no system for inserting local commercials by location, CNBC reports, so a fan who streams the game there is one the local station can’t sell to. NBC did something similar with Peacock last February, selling streaming-only ads in the slots usually reserved for local stations, Variety reported.

Fox said Super Bowl LIX on FOX and Tubi generated more than $800 million in gross ad sales across all its platforms. CNBC’s own math for a standard game is about 85 thirty-second spots at an average of $8 million, or $680 million. A Disney spokesperson told CNBC the national commercials will be the same on every platform.

The “Star Wars” feed is the one place Disney gives up ad money too.

Disney says “there’s nothing unprecedented about this approach,” and that it has “successfully navigated similar situations in collaboration with the governing board many times before.” The anonymous station CEO put it more bluntly: “Any time you fragment distribution, you’re destroying value for each of the individual platforms.” The ABC affiliates’ board is discussing the plan, and its chairman declined to comment.

TEGNA, whose annual report listed its ABC agreements as expiring in 2026, renewed the deals for all its ABC stations, in 13 markets, on Oct. 13, with no terms disclosed and no mention of the Super Bowl.

Every ABC station’s share of this game now depends on how many people still watch it on ABC.

Sources

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