Discovery – Sky Dispute

Sky and NOW TV subscribers in the UK and Ireland could soon lose all of Discovery’s channels and programmes. Every week, more than five and a half million people watch one of their shows on Sky. Discovery say that their fans are amongst the most loyal in TV and they have invested significantly to bring world class channels and high quality programmes to the UK for nearly 30 years.

From 1st February, 13 channels may disappear from Sky and NOW TV.

They are; Discovery Channel, TLC, Eurosport 1, Eurosport 2, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery, Quest, DMAX, Discovery Turbo, Discovery Shed, Discovery Science, Discovery History and Home & Health. Quest will still be available on Freeview, Virgin Media, BT TV and YouView.

A Discovery spokesperson said “We at Discovery are hugely humbled by the public support for our channels. The reaction from viewers and celebrities is staggering and we are really grateful. Our wonderful viewers deserve to keep the programmes and sports events that they adore and we still hope that this situation can be resolved with Sky.”

Discovery says the channels will be coming off the Sky and NOW TV platforms in just over four days if an agreement isn’t reached. This affects Discovery Channel, TLC, ID, Eurosport, Discovery History, Animal Planet, Discovery Shed, Home and Health, DMAX, Discovery Science and Discovery Turbo. Quest will still be available on Freeview and Virgin Media.

Sky has respnded the ongoing carriage dispute with Discovery, saying it wasn’t prepared to pay “close to £1 billion” for its portfolio of channels – the price demanded by the US factual and sports TV giant for ongoing carriage on Sky’s TV platforms.

Responding directly to criticism from viewers, Sky said it “doesn’t boot channels off the platform. If Discovery don’t want their channels to disappear, as their public campaign suggests, they could have made arrangement to stay on Sky, including free-to-air with advertising funding or with their own subscription, but they’ve chosen not to do so.”

On Wednesday evening, Sky said the channels “will” be removed from its platform at the end of the month, while Discovery said they “could” be removed, giving rise to allegations that Sky was pulling the channels. Sky is now advising subscribers with the revised wording that these channels are “unlikely” to be available from February.