ESPN pay cuts?

ESPN will face a reckoning at some point because most of its revenue is from cable carriage fees. As of now, it's managed to protect its status as the biggest earner because it has spent aggressively on live sports, but at a certain point the bubble is probably going to burst on that. (i.e. Things get too expensive, and ESPN can't afford enough inventory of major sports, or cable viewership dips so low that their revenue dips into the negative.) All that being said, I still think they're going to be the dominant force in sports journalism / entertainment - whatever you want to call it - but maybe they just make hundreds of millions a year, instead of billions a year.

 

At some point people are gonna be like, WTF? Why am I paying for 20 streaming services and a small fortune on high speed that may or may not actually work? I might as well just get a cable bundle.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/22/nfl-sunday-ticket-youtube-tv.html

 

Ourand from SBJ has been saying for more than a year that it was going to Apple.

He also said ESPN wasn't getting spun off, as WF predicts.

Possibly two very big whiffs.

 

Cable is dead. Cable became popular in the 80's and satellite television in the 90's. When internet came along in the 90's the the technology did not exist to provide sufficient band width to carry live action films and television shows. Hence the need for cable wiring or a satellite dish in your home. Now the technology exists to stream over the internet. The cable wiring or satellite dish is now redundant. It is why I pay about $75 for my Fubo streaming service than the $150 I paid DirectTV.

The challenge ABC and ESPN is to move off the cable carriers, which are disappearing, into the streaming environment. Changing a business model in this fashion can be very hard. I hope it goes better for the television and cable networks than it did for the newspaper industry.

 

Hot take: Streaming sucks.

For starters, I gotta go into the back end of my Comcast setup, figure out which app is showing a game, click on that app, wait for the app to load, wait for the option to pull up that game to load, pull up the game, wait for the feed to load, and then sit through what might or might not be a buggy stream for two hours.

Or I could just watch it on ESPN, where I can press the three-digit channel number and get there in two seconds.

Sure, $75 for streaming + $50 for high speed (and that's on the lower end of high speed nowadays, I think) saves you $25 a month. And then if you're a Premier League fan you're paying for Peacock if you don't have high speed and TV through Comcast. And if you like whatever show is on HBO, you're paying for HBO Go. Or if you want Champions League you're paying for Paramount+. Or if you like Ivy League football you're getting ESPN+. And the kids want whatever streaming service that shows the hot new show. It's only going to get worse as viewership becomes more fragmented.

I spend ~$180 on my bundle. I get pretty much everything I want. Ladyfriend spends about $15 on Disney bundle, which means I can watch random Division III hoops on a Tuesday night. For the most part what I want to see is on cable TV. I know that's going to change, eventually, but for now I'm fine with it. I hope when it does change that they find a more efficient way to channel-find, never mind channel-hop.

 

Ha I was just saying this on the NFL Week 16 thread. As you noted later on, it will likely change at some point, probably when today's kids are the bill payers and have zero experience with cable. But we'll all be on the moon by then.

 

https://www.nexttv.com/news/sinclair-stock-drops-7-on-regional-sports-network-report

 

Lancey - You say that the cable wiring or satellite dish is now redundant because of the Internet...where does your Internet come from? Everywhere I've lived the only choices for Internet providers have been the local cable company or Fios, so 'cord-cutting' has never really created any downward competitive pressure on pricing. You don't want to pay us for cable? Then you'll pay us more for Internet! They've adjusted their pricing and performance structures so that there really isn't much to gain by going with an outside streaming TV provider.

Right now I pay about $185 a month for mid-tier Internet and a cable package that includes all the major sports/news channels. If I got rid of the cable, I'd have to pay something like $75 a month for Internet alone, not including taxes/fees. Add in $75 for a YouTube TV sub and that brings the bill up to $150. Ballpark $15/mo for taxes/fees and the price tag is up to $165/mo. Still some savings, but the extra $20 a month gives you a better navigation experience, better picture quality for sports, and no bandwidth/lag issues. Plus, my bill was significantly less than $180 for the first two years of my contract.

 

I use the website Streameast to watch all my sports. Every game is there. Certainly completely illegal. Also completely free, which cancels out all the other issues like lags, freezes, cumbersome to switch games, you don’t pick which broadcast team you get, and the broadcasts are a couple minutes behind.

 

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I pay $65 a month for Fubo television,plus an additional $10 a month for a sports package that includes Red Zone, and $45 for 500 mbp internet. My county is served by Cox Cable and their charge for the same service is $165 a month. DirectTV was $150 a month without internet service.

Personally I do not find my streaming service difficult to use nd I am saving $500-$600 a year. Our experiences will differ because we live in different areas where local provider pricing is different.

 

MLB games went away late in the season, and it hasn't had NHL games this season (although there is another good site for those streams.)