ESPN Has Seen the Future of TV and They're Not Really Into It (bloomberg.com)

From a report: ESPN has lost more than 12 million subscribers since 2011, according to Nielsen, and the viewership erosion seems to be accelerating. Last fall, ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in a single month, the most in the company's history. In some respects, the challenges facing ESPN are the same that confront every other media company: Young people simply aren't consuming cable TV, newspapers, or magazines in the numbers they once did, and digital outlets still aren't lucrative enough to make up the deficit. But while most of ESPN's TV peers have courted cord cutters -- CBS and Turner Broadcasting, for instance, are allowing anyone to watch some of their March Madness games online for free -- ESPN's view cuts against the conventional wisdom in new media. Essentially, ESPN was hoping that sports will remain unaffected by the growing trend of "cord-cutting." The article adds: If a combination of hockey, low-wattage college sports, and cricket doesn't quite seem worthy of the Worldwide Leader in Sports, that's by design: ESPN doesn't want its new product to draw viewers away from its very profitable cable channel. And, as John Kosner, the network's head of digital and print media notes, when ESPN began broadcasting in 1979, plenty of people doubted whether anyone would want to watch bowling at two in the morning. "I was in college when ESPN started," he says. "I felt sorry for the people working there."

Comments

Not really that surprised.

[w3woody]

I have ESPN as part of my cable package. I don't watch ESPN. I don't care at all about ESPN. Yet somehow because I have a package I'm getting ESPN. And when the future changes such that I can cancel my cable package and get the channels I actually watch a' la cart, ESPN would be the last channel I subscribe to.

And I suspect a lot of people are like me: we have ESPN, we're paying for ESPN, but we don't watch ESPN. And I strongly suspects ESPN knows this. So it makes sense ESPN would be worried; suddenly the unsustainability of their economic position--being subsidized by millions of viewers like myself--will be exposed.

Re:Not really that surprised.

[MightyMartian]

And that's the real problem for the traditional TV dial in the future. For many years networks have been guaranteed on a slot on the dial simply because of the way TV channels have been bundled, but as various forms of a' la cart, the most important being streaming, mature and giants like Netflix and Amazon seem destined within a decade or so to completely swamp traditional cable, these channels are in crisis. And if ESPN falls, then it's going to bite deeply into a lot of the pro sports. I can well imagine that sooner or later as the big leagues like the NBA and NFL watch ESPN's subscriber levels erode, they may ask themselves "Why the hell aren't we just selling directly to the consumer?"

The broadcast world knows better

[bradley13]

I'm in Europe, so it's not ESPOn, but we occasionally watch sports on television. Aside from the fact that young people watch less television, there is also a serious disconnect with what viewers want. I'll be the same applies in the US.

One example: One of the sports that we watch is tennis. I play tennis. We know how the game goes. A couple of years ago, there was a technical problem, and we could hear the game itself, the crowd, the referee, the players - but no announcers. Bliss . It was almost like being there - heck, with the camera placement, it was probably better than being there.

The announcers talk about the obvious (yes, thank you, I know that was a fault). They gossip (yes, isn't his wife wearing a nice dress). They blather (I don't care what the weather at the venue was like yesterday). They might be marginally helpful for someone who doesn't know the sport, but surely most people watching an event do, in fact, know what's going on.

Television here almost always has two audio channels (often used for alternate languages). We wrote to the station, told them of our very happy experience, and suggested that they use one audio channel for the usual experience with announcers, and one channel for just the live "you are there" experience. Surprisingly, we did receive a response: They were insulted. Their announcers provide a valuable service, and they would certainly never broadcast a sports events without that added value.

That's only one anecdote, but I think it's typical: The people in the broadcast world know what we want, and we had damned well better like it. That is at least part of the reason why their viewer numbers are tanking.

Re:ESPN affected 'most' by cutting?

[ArhcAngel]

It was Disney (80% owner of ESPN) who did the strong arming of cable companies. They managed to get all cable/sat companies to carry ALL ESPN channels by refusing to license just The Disney Channel. To get The Disney Channel they required the license of the ESPN package as well. And it had to be in the basic/economy tier of service. So while the cable companies are evil, greedy SOB's Disney helped jack up the price of your cable plan just as much. Perhaps Disney has a long term contract with their cable customer (TW, Comcast, et al) and won't be affected for several years.