More Cuts at ESPN

Mercurial.

 

Interesting that she didn't tell him he needed to lose some weight.

 

I think one accomplishment of the Ringer is that it has destroyed the market for ESPN Insider. The Insider appears to have a lot of hard-core NBA material that the Ringer is providing for free.

 

Anybody notice that Adrian Woj. has been on TV a lot today? Looks like with ESPN getting rid of Katz and others he's going to be the guy they groom to be the big TV voice with their huge NBA contract. You think he's one of those guys who is meant to write and break news and will be less than effective on TV? He doesn't seem like the typical happy TV guy. Katz and Goodman are OK but they've definitely bought into the "be happy on TV" look.

 

Obviously, they want to promote Woj being part of the team now. And NBA free agency is legitimately big news, so you want your lead guy, if not the lead guy when it comes to NBA transactions, out there, no?

As for Woj vs. Katz (hard to believe about 20 years ago they were both at the Fresno Bee, when that paper gave a damn about sports, isn't it?), while Woj is the NBA guy, Katz was the college guy (and Obama's bracketologist), so don't know how much air time he'd get now.

 

So Disney announced it will be launching a new ESPN streaming service in the near future, with add-ons for different sports. Although this has always been a concern of mine, becoming more convinced that the whole a-la-carte phenomena is going to end up leaving us with a much more fragmented system for watching content (i.e., having to subscribe to eight different services, versus just cable) and not really going to save consumers all that much, particularly if you like sports (which are the most expensive channels in most cable packages and essentially being subsidized by those who don't watch them).

Disney’s new ESPN streaming service is launching next year

 

So what you're saying is, consumers will actually have to pay for content after all.

Wow.

 

Regarding J.A. Adande leaving ESPN to focus on his teaching/administrative job at Northwestern. OK, that makes sense -- how could you do both? Or perhaps Adande was simply laid off by ESPN and now it's his way of putting it?

 

And call him Baby Boy.

 

It's about time ESPN got with the program on MLS and realized its potential. MLS is the fastest growing sport in this country and will be bigger than NFL in five years