With its stock price hovering near decade lows, Disney (NYSE:DIS) executives continue to be besieged by crisis, distraction, and kerfuffle – the latest involves college football nixed from the television screens of some 15 million cable subscribers.

Disney, which is still wrestling to pin down its streaming strategy for ESPN, is tangled in a dispute with America’s second-largest cable firm Charter Spectrum (the ‘major’ carrier in New York and Los Angeles) as Disney seeks to raise its rates.

The dispute reached an apex on Thursday night as Disney channels ‘went dark’ across the network during an ESPN broadcast of the college football game between Florida and Utah, described as “the first big game of the season”, and, while ‘world number 1’ male tennis player Carlos Alcaraz played his second round match at the US Open, in New York.

Disney, in a statement circulated via media outlets, acknowledged that despite holding ongoing negotiations ‘for some time’ it had yet to reach a new “market based” agreement.

The company subsequently confirmed that Spectrum TV subscribers no longer have access to Disney, ESPN, FX, and National Geographic channels.

While it would appear as an abrupt “cord-cutting’ for those subscribers, the situation is not without a wider context.

Those customers have access to all the company’s channels (so long as they have a sufficient internet provision) directly from Disney and its online streaming services, which are now well established as a core part of the conglomerate.

Disney now has more than 145 million paying subscribers worldwide across its myriad of branded streaming services – Disney+ is the primary brand almost everywhere, while customers can also include ESPN, Hulu and other channel groups depending on their location.

ESPN has, however, remained something of an awkward fit in this offering.

Premium sports operate at a different price point, compared to the scripted shows, movies and reality TV that span the likes of Disney+, Netflix, AppleTV and Amazon Prime Video.

Buying up exclusive sports rights is an expensive game, albeit Disney recently found out how costly losing them can be after user numbers in India plummeted when it dropped Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket.

Amazon continues to dip its toe in the market, notably via its coverage of the NFL’s ‘Thursday Night Football’.

More broadly, however, none of the major streaming platforms have gone all out for major sports rights.

Earlier this month Disney moved the ESPN brand into the sports betting business, in a multi-billion dollar partnership with Penn, indicating that the media company is taking a bolder-than-you-might-expect approach to sports.

This month, Disney was reported to be in talks with Amazon over ESPN’s future, with the Bezos-controlled company potentially taking a minority stake in the sports broadcast business alongside a streaming partnership.

A deal would, according to reports, see ESPN deliver live sports content directly to consumers for between $20 and $35 per month. Presently, the ESPN+ app streams mostly second-tier sporting events and fixtures that are not otherwise broadcast ‘exclusively’ on TV.

Disney’s most recent financial results, released in August, meanwhile, told a simple story.

Revenue from ‘linear networks’ (i.e. television) was down 7% year-over-year, at $6.7 billion, and while ‘direct-to-consumer’ (i.e. streaming) revenue was smaller, at $5.5 billion, it was up 9% compared to the same period a year ago.

Chief executive Bob Iger said that is “not a matter of if but when” ESPN is pushed fully to ‘direct-to-consumer’, though the company continued to consider its options on pricing and timing.

Evidently, these factors are among the market forces that form the backdrop to Disney’s talks with Charter Spectrum.

The long-term strategy and the broader trend appear quite clear even if in the near term things look volatile.

Disney has other troubles too. A number of the larger TV and movie studios it owns are stuck in a  much-publicized strike action in Hollywood.

It remains to be seen what comes next for both the entertainment and sports divisions at Disney, though the stock price would certainly welcome a catalyst.

Disney has lost around $15 billion of market value since Bob Iger’s return in November 2022.

Last week the stock dropped to within touching distance of a ten-year low.

And today, at around $83 a share, Disney is hovering around 9-year lows.