Walt Disney and DirecTV have announced a multi-year distribution agreement that will provide DirecTV customers access to Fusion early next year. This deal means Fusion has nearly doubled its distribution since launching last year and will soon be available in nearly 40 million homes.
Fusion CEO Isaac Lee announced the news in an email to his staff. TVNewser has obtained the letter, Check it out, after the jump.
Hola Fusion,
I am very pleased to share an exciting update about the reach and distribution of our television programming — we have reached an agreement for Fusion to be carried by DirecTV.
This deal means that Fusion will be available in nearly 40 million homes beginning early next year, almost doubling our distribution since our launch last year. This is a great victory for our entire team, and provides us with considerable momentum as we head into the New Year.
Our parent companies have been extremely helpful throughout this process, and we are especially thankful to the Disney/ABC affiliate sales and marketing team who put in an incredible amount of hard work to help get us to this point. The role of Disney/ABC in this negotiation has been a clear sign of their support for the work you do every day. Their unbelievable negotiating skills, coupled with the great content you all are producing, put us in the position we are in today.
All of you are tirelessly working to give our audience — a diverse generation of young people — content that is authentic, reflective of their values, funny, and most importantly: meaningful to their daily lives in a way that respects their intelligence. Whether it’s Jorge Ramos asking President Obama the tough questions about immigration reform, or our multi-platform investigative reports that integrate dynamic forms of storytelling across our digital and television platforms, or our in-depth reporting on Ferguson, Eric Garner, and Cuba — Fusion continues to be the only network telling the stories that millennials really care about.
When Fusion launched, we wanted to create an incubator for innovation, which would allow us to experiment and learn and constantly evolve. Today’s announcement, that our reach in American households is doubling, is an affirmation of our progress and a clear sign that we are moving in the right direction.
As millennials continue to garner increasing economic and cultural influence, media companies and distributors increasingly are recognizing that they need to provide programming that speaks to the interests and passions of this young, multicultural generation. Fusion is already providing that content in a way that no one else is, and we have a lot of exciting projects ahead that people are not going to want to miss out on.
I could not be more excited for Fusion’s future and look forward to many more exciting developments in the new year. Happy Holidays!!
Abrazos,
Isaac