By R.L. Bynum
You’re likely frustrated if you are a Spectrum cable customer who can’t make it to Kenan Stadium for Saturday’s 5:15 UNC home football opener against Appalachian State.
ACC Network, one of the 26 channels currently off Spectrum’s menu because of a carriage dispute between Charter Communications and Disney, will televise the game.
In addition to cable customers not being able to watch any ESPN channels until the dispute is resolved, they won’t be able to watch Tar Heels games in other sports that stream on ESPN3.
The next women’s soccer games (at No. 12 Alabama at 7 p.m. Sunday) is on ESPNU. UNC’s men’s soccer ACC opener 7 p.m. Friday at Virginia Tech streams on ESPN3.
UNC’s football game against Minnesota on Sept. 16 will air on ESPN or ESPN2. The ACC hasn’t announced TV assignments for the Sept. 23 football game at Pittsburgh or the Oct. 7 home game against Syracuse, but those likely will also be on ESPN channels.
There are ways to watch those channels free, even for Spectrum customers, if you want to stick with cable and hope the dispute gets settled in about a month.
Three providers that offer free trial subscriptions have those ESPN channels on their menus. It’s important in all cases to set a reminder so that you don’t forget to cancel before the trial period expires so that you aren’t charged.
At 21 days, YouTube TV’s free trial is the longest, but you can likely only get the free trial if you never previously had a free trial of the service.
If you don’t want to pay for YouTube TV and the dispute is still going on after those 21 days, you can get a seven-day trial of Fubo. If you exhaust those two free trials and Spectrum still doesn’t have those channels back, you can then go to DirecTV Stream for a five-day trial.
Hopefully, for the sake of cable customers, the dispute will be resolved by the time they get through those three trials.
tarheeltribune.com 
