Ten months after Apple pried Formula 1’s U.S. broadcast rights away from ESPN, Disney has found its next motorsport tenant — and it’s not another gasoline-burning series. On August 11, Formula E announced a multi-year agreement making Disney+ the global streaming home of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship across 144 territories, with ESPN+ carrying the series alongside Disney+ in the United States. The deal kicks off with the 2026/27 season, which doubles as the launch of Formula E’s new GEN4 car.
The scope is broad by design. Subscribers get every practice session, qualifying session, and race live, plus preview and review shows, full replays on demand, and behind-the-scenes programming — the same playbook Disney has used to make live sports a subscription habit rather than a one-off purchase. Formula E’s Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Dodds, called it a “landmark moment” for the championship, and it’s easy to see why: this is by far the widest streaming footprint the series has had in a single deal.
What makes this different from a straightforward rights sale is that Formula E isn’t moving into the Disney ecosystem exclusively. The series says the Disney+ and ESPN+ coverage sits alongside its existing free-to-air and linear broadcast partnerships around the world, rather than replacing them. That’s a meaningfully different structure than what happened to Formula 1 in the U.S., where Apple’s five-year exclusive broadcast deal ended ESPN’s long run as the sport’s American home starting with the 2026 season. Formula E is layering a new platform on top of its existing distribution; F1 swapped platforms entirely.
That contrast explains why Disney went looking for a motorsport replacement in the first place. Losing F1 didn’t just cost Disney a broadcast package — it cost ESPN a marquee live-sports draw the network had spent years building an audience around. Formula E is a different kind of asset: smaller in audience and prize money, majority-owned by Liberty Global, and considerably cheaper to license, but available across a genuinely global footprint rather than a single market. Neither side disclosed the financial terms of the new agreement, which is typical for deals like this, but the logic is straightforward: Disney gets a live, scheduled motorsport property with room to grow, without bidding against Apple, NBC, or Warner Bros. Discovery for another marquee series.
There’s also a technical story tied to the timing. GEN4, launching alongside this deal, is Formula E’s biggest engineering step since the series went to a single chassis supplier in 2014. Formula E puts the new car’s peak output at 600 kW — more than 815 horsepower by the series’ own figures — with 0-60 mph in roughly 1.8 seconds, a number the series is marketing as around 30 percent quicker to 60 than an F1 car. That claim holds up as far as it goes: electric motors deliver full torque instantly and can put all of it down through four driven corners in a way a turbo-hybrid V6 can’t off the line. It’s also an incomplete comparison — F1 cars are dramatically faster through corners and at the top end, where aerodynamics and gearing take over from raw launch torque. Treat the 0-60 figure as a genuine engineering milestone, not evidence that GEN4 is now quicker than an F1 car around a full lap.
The calendar adds a practical wrinkle to Disney’s streaming math. The 2026/27 season runs 21 races across 13 events, opening in Jeddah on December 18, 2026, and closing in Tokyo on July 25, 2027. Starting in mid-December means Formula E’s new season goes live while Formula 1 is still in its off-season — a scheduling gap that IndyCar’s own new-car transition is wrestling with in a different way. For a streaming platform trying to hold onto sports subscribers through the winter months, a live series with real championship stakes is useful programming, not just a rights-portfolio checkbox.
None of this guarantees Formula E becomes appointment viewing on Disney+. Media companies increasingly treat live sports rights as subscriber-retention tools rather than standalone profit centers, and Formula E remains a considerably smaller draw than the properties Disney has bet on elsewhere. But the underlying instinct — locking in long-term stability rather than negotiating year to year — matches a pattern showing up across motorsport’s business side, from Red Bull locking up Max Verstappen through 2030 to the timing behind Williams’ own 2027 driver moves under F1’s cost cap.
For fans, the practical change lands this December. In the U.S., Formula E’s full season will be accessible through Disney+ and ESPN+, while the championship’s other broadcast partners continue serving local markets elsewhere. It’s a real upgrade in reach for a championship that’s spent a decade fighting for shelf space against combustion motorsport’s bigger, louder incumbents — and for Disney, it’s a way to keep a live, global motorsport property in the portfolio while it tallies up what walking away from Formula 1 actually cost.
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