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Bill Simmons Says ESPN Blew It By Not Embracing Tech (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: ESPN's problem isn't competition over content: They didn't position themselves for a future where cord cutting was a reality, according to former ESPN personality Bill Simmons. "They didn't see a lot of this coming," said Simmons. "They didn't see cord cutting coming. They weren't ready for it. A lot of decisions were made based on subs staying at a certain level. They had to realize they were a technology company. The ones winning are now Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Hulu. ESPN should have been in that mix, but they're in Bristol. They should have had a place in Silicon Valley. That was their biggest mistake." ESPN is far from over, Simmons points out. Though it may make less money in the future, it has such strong cable deals, he said. "Everybody in here was paying $7 for ESPN whether they watched or not," he said. Simmons left ESPN in May 2015 after a public breakup, and signed a deal for an HBO series called "Any Given Wednesday" shortly after. The HBO show was cancelled in November 2016. Simmons also launched a new website called The Ringer in 2016. Also read Bloomberg's profile of executives at the company: ESPN Has Seen the Future of TV and They're Not Really Into It.
Of the ~$28/month that cable companies pay for their basic basket of content, over $8/month goes to ESPN and neither the cable company nor end customer has a say in the matter.
ESPN decided to focus more on political statements than on pure sport culture, which may have given them a bump in viewership for a while, but its not going to sustain interest. 3 months of analysis about who is standing during the national anthem is enough to drive the most avid sports enthusiast away.
In the past, I wanted cable tv without ESPN.
Now I want internet service without cable tv.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Remember when commercials only came every 1/4 hour, and were fairly short in duration?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Sports in general has gotten too political. The entire point of watching sports is to escape all the shitty stuff in real life.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Man, you're so committed to the crap that gets fed to you on your email list that you're willing to face ridicule by positing a completely orthogonal theory to the TFA. I mean, fuck Bill Simmons, he only worked there, right?
Kudos to your brass balls.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
is this one: "Everybody in here was paying $7 for ESPN whether they watched or not."
And that's precisely why I will never, ever watch ESPN, nor any sport it signs a deal with -- even if they subsequently leave ESPN. I've lived in the USA for a bit over 18 years now, and paid for cable or satellite TV for all of that time. Let's assume that $7 figure applies for the whole of that time, and does so in 2017 dollars (so in then-dollars it was some much lower sum). I think that's a pretty safe assumption, and it says I've personally paid US$6,700+ into the pockets of ESPN and its affiliated sports, yet I've watched maybe between five and ten minutes of ESPN in the last couple of decades. At around US$900/minute, that's hands-down the most expensive entertainment of my life.
And it's also why I will never renew my cable or satellite TV subscription until a la carte is a thing. Nor will I sign up for any online service which doesn't either offer a la carte options, or which focuses solely on programming *I* am interested in. The likes of YouTube TV et al. which simply carry over these awful deals into the internet age hold no interest for me.
Let's see.... MTV used to play music videos, then got into reality tv. The weather channel used to have a person standing in front of a radar map, not you have to watch 10 minutes of "storm stories" to get your local weather. And ESPN forgot it was a sports network. In another industry, McDonalds seems to have forgotten it's core customer as well.... people wanting FAST food. If we wanted GOOD food, we wouldn't be here. Long gone are the days of walking into McD's and seeing what was on the line and getting that and getting out. They prefer just in time production model which makes we wait for a cheese burger behind the person who wanted a cheese burger w/o cheese and extra mustard. Like so many maturing companies, they have lost their direction.
No, I don't think that's accurate. ESPN just had a large number of layoffs again, and have actually started using programs from MLB Network to cut costs. ESPN's problem is paying massive fees for rights to broadcast certain things when it just didn't make sense.
Longhorn Network is a great example of this, betting on interest in a network primarily for University of Texas sports while showing games from a few smaller schools in the state. They've paid huge rights fees for the rights to college football and, to some extent, basketball from major conferences. They're also on the hook for huge deals with MLB, the NBA, and the NFL.
Every time those packages get renegotiated, the rates go up quite a bit, and the networks keep paying for them. They bet that advertisers would keep paying more to air commercials during those times and that cable companies would go along with raising subscription fees. ESPN bet on the advertising bubble and now they're regretting it.
This has little to do with politics, despite your attempt to turn it into a political discussion. Take your political trolling elsewhere. It's about advertising being less lucrative and cable companies becoming less willing to renegotiate subscriber fees. Charter, in particular, is concerned with keeping those fees down because they need to pay off the debt from the Time Warner Cable acquisition. At some point, networks need to quit driving up the prices for the rights to broadcast live sports, and refuse to bid any higher.
Microsoft giving tablets to the NFL and the broadcasters kept calling them iPads throughout the games?
.
The forced bundling made ESPN complacent about costs, and now ESPN is the most expensive cable channel, by a long shot. Many people no longer want to pay for ESPN. Talk about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs... that is ESPN's problem. Pure business greed,.
Anything that doesn't conform to rigid conservative dogma gets excommunicated and called "progressive". It's really that simple.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I was asking about concrete examples of what makes a sports TV channel "progressive" or not.
I don't respond to AC's.
I mean, fuck Bill Simmons, he only worked there, right?
Seems to me that the people who ran the place into the ground are the last ones we should look to for insight on how they fucked it up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I was talking with my wife about this and I said in the last year (or whatever) my favorite TV show or movie had been Stranger Things. The show was nothing special, no fantastic plot or Terrible Secret of Space I hadn't seen before, and the acting was solid but not phenomenal. But it was a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and characters with motivations that made sense. And no political commentary, it wasn't trying to teach me a story about racism in a small town or female empowerment, and no associated political controversy. It was just a coherent story about some people and some weird shit and that was enough to make it best of the year. And that's sad.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
There aren't any, that's the point. All any TV network cares about is eyeballs and ad revenue. Trying to tie them down ideologically is a fruitless task.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Sure, if it was some nameless exec VP. But Simmons was talent, not management.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I wasn't aware that ESPN made a corporate statement about the NC bathroom bill. All I can see if them reporting on it, since the NCAA refused to have championship games there until it was repealed.
What does an NFL player have to do with ESPN?
I'm still confused as to what ESPN did to be "aggressively progressive". Were they not supposed to report on NCAA's actions? Were they not supposed to report on the whole not standing during the national anthem thing? Does just reporting facts make an organization "aggressively progressive" in your mind (or the mind of other people)?
I don't respond to AC's.
In the very early days, they didn't have much big-name stuff, so they tended to air the offbeat sports that were inexpensive to get the rights to. You could watch Australian Rules Football or Sumo wrestling, and it was kind of entertaining for a change of pace. But now it is all the big $$$ crap. And if there isn't a game on, you have a bunch of idiots bloviating about sports just to fill time until some game actually starts. It is probably the case that you could use AI to come up with a bot that just pontificates about sports all day long, and it would be about as informative as the knuckleheads that they currently have on. And have you ever noticed that the blowhards never talk about the sports that aren't on ESPN? My wife is a hockey fan, and she sure noticed.
I guess you'd have to watch the commentary shows, then, to understand (there's a real difference between "commenting on" and "endorsing a side"). Not that I recommend it - your curiosity is better unsatisfied on this point.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There are enough venues for progressive (and conservative, for that matter, even though its not a factor in this instance) media to promote their agenda. I just want the ball-game score and the highlights. I don't want social commentary.
It's a reason that's been discussed on other forums. Pointing it out, even if orthogonal to the original article is still informative, because if it is true and the ESPN honchos continue to ignore it based on their internal echo-chamber idea of what they did wrong, they might fix the wrong thing. OTOH, the SJW-angle could be insignificant and they can save the network by making various technical adjustments and double down on the SJW content. They can hire Colin Kaepernick as a talk-show host.
From Salon.com
Longtime ESPN anchor Linda Cohn argued that her network’s alleged liberal bent scared off some of its viewers and subscribers, leading to this week’s “bloodbath” in Bristol.
During a radio interview on 77 WABC Thursday, Cohn addressed the mass layoffs at her network, which saw over 100 on-air talent get the pink slip this week — including a former co-anchor of Cohn’s. The sportscaster candidly blamed the firings on “bad decision making” by ESPN executives.
Talking head Bernard McGuirk, one of the hosts of “The Bernie and Sid Show,” asked Cohn if the “whole Kaepernick thing,” and Caitlyn Jenner winning an award at the ESPYs, perhaps explained the network’s dwindling audience.
“There seems to be a lot of folks that have distaste for the way ESPN goes about some of their programming, and some of their promotions, when socially folks don’t accept these things,” McGuirk said.
“That is definitely a percentage of it,” Cohn immediately agreed, according to the New York Post. “I don’t know how big a percentage, but if anyone wants to ignore that fact, they’re blind,” she said.
From ESPN.com
http://www.espn.com/blog/ombud...
Jim Brady, Public Editor Dec 1, 2016
The 2016 presidential election season has been one most of us will never forget. The tone has been ugly, the controversies endless, the coverage unrelenting. Our social media feeds are full of politically charged statements, and what dialogue does exist between differing sides more often resembles a WWE match than nuanced debate.
Thankfully, I get to write about ESPN, where the focus on sports means I never have to deal with politics.
Ah, if only that were true.
As it turns out, ESPN is far from immune from the political fever that has afflicted so much of the country over the past year. Internally, there’s a feeling among many staffers -- both liberal and conservative -- that the company’s perceived move leftward has had a stifling effect on discourse inside the company and has affected its public-facing products. Consumers have sensed that same leftward movement, alienating some.
Before digging in, one quick clarification: I’m not here to advocate that ESPN take any particular political position or lean a certain way. It’s not my place to make that recommendation, and no one would listen anyway. This is more about the impact that taking a more identifiable political stance -- which I do believe ESPN has done -- is having on the company.
For most of its history, ESPN was viewed relatively apolitically. Its core focus was -- and remains today, of course -- sports. Although the nature of sports meant an occasional detour into politics and culture was inevitable, there wasn’t much chatter about an overall perceived political bias. If there was any tension internally, it didn’t manifest itself publicly.
That has changed in the past few years, and ESPN staffers cite several factors. One is the rise of social media, which has led to more direct political commentary by ESPN employees, even if not delivered via the network’s broadcast or digital pipes. Another is ESPN's increase in debate-themed shows, which encourage strong opinions that are increasingly focusing on the overlap between sports and politics.
There have also been concrete actions that have created a perception that ESPN has chosen a political side, such as awarding Caitlyn Jenner the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2015 ESPYS despite her not having competed athletically for decades, the company’s decision to move a golf tournament away from a club owned by presidential candidate Donald Trump and a perceived inequity in how punishments for controversial statements were meted out.
Many ESPN employees I talked to -- including liberals and conservatives, most of whom preferred to speak on background -- worry that the company’s politics have become a little too obvious, empowering those who feel as if they’re in line with the company’s position and driving underground those who don’t.
But, in talking to people in the course of reporting this piece, it is clear that ESPN has a challenge in front of it. I don’t think the answer is to try to stifle those with strong viewpoints; rather, it’s to make sure a broader range of voices are heard.
Why, some might ask? Because, at heart, ESPN is a business. And based on a Gallup survey on political affiliation from mid-September, 44 percent of the country identifies itself as either “Republican” or “leans Republican.” That’s less than the 49 percent that identifies itself as “Democrat” or “leans Democrat,” but not by much.
ESPN can complain about whatever but the main thing is they are in trouble because people don't want to watch them and when you ask a large portion of those people they make comments along the line of having to suffer through the political garbage they keep bringing up.
For example and why the subject, ESPN was in the background at work and one of the show started to talk about hillarys speech from yesterday.