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The Carriage Trap

YouTube and Fox reached a deal Thursday night. But their unusual carriage spat had YouTube asking Fox to treat it like Amazon, while Fox insisted the real comp should be Charter or DirecTV. The stakes of this battle could impact YouTube TV’s coming deals with NBCU and Disney, too.

Neal Mohan
YouTube TV, with its 10 million subscribers, is not a streamer like Prime Video, but rather a distributor like Charter or DirecTV—and the network executives generally believe that its deals should follow the paradigm set by its distribution peers. Photo: Misha Friedman/Bloomberg/Getty Images
John Ourand
August 28, 2025

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In some respects, this week’s carriage battle between YouTube TV and Fox was just like every other dispute from the past three decades where a distributor and programmer beef over the cost and tiering of linear television channels. And, despite public rancor from both sides, YouTube and Fox were able to reach a deal Thursday night. That means that Fox, FS1 and Fox News will remain on YouTube TV without disruption.