<story><title>ESPN Loses 621,000 Subscribers; Worst Month in Company History</title><url>http://www.outkickthecoverage.com/espn-loses-621-000-subscribers-worst-month-in-company-history-102916</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IBM</author><text>Would you spend $25-35 per month for ESPN? Because that&amp;#x27;s what it would probably cost if it wasn&amp;#x27;t subsidized by the bundle.&lt;p&gt;Your answer to that question may in fact be yes, but the economics don&amp;#x27;t work out. Disney would make more money getting $6 from every cable subscriber than try to scratch and claw to scale up an OTT service like Netflix that would inevitably cannibalize their current business.&lt;p&gt;The only thing that will change the economics is when the market forces their hand, which is what this story is about.</text></item><item><author>Phlow</author><text>I would pay ESPN $10 a month for an ESPN streaming app that had access to all the college football games (no blackouts), alone, as long as it didn&amp;#x27;t require a cable subscription.  The current ESPN streaming app is garbage, compared to Netflix, and other on-demand interfaces.  It&amp;#x27;s not available on my Smart TV.  The quality of the streaming is terrible.  It&amp;#x27;s slow to bring up video.  The ads are repetitive and annoying, and it&amp;#x27;s a second class citizen with wait screens while local ads are up on broadcast.&lt;p&gt;Comcast recently decided to institute a 1TB&amp;#x2F;month cap in my area, with a charge of $10 per 50GB after up to $200, or $50 for unlimited (opt-in, by the sounds).  There are no technical reasons why they did this, it was entirely to gain more revenue to make up for the cord cutters.  Their own streaming service doesn&amp;#x27;t apply to their data cap.&lt;p&gt;The whole thing is garbage and needs to be completely changed.  The moment Google Fiber or something better comes along in my area, I&amp;#x27;m going internet only, and I&amp;#x27;ll just go without until they realize how badly they&amp;#x27;ve managed to move with the trends and start fixing it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matt4077</author><text>Sports is the one area where it basically costs whatever people decide. IF ESPN goes belly-up, somebody will buy the rights for less money, and the cycle continues until it finds a new balance. There&amp;#x27;s a lot of flexibility in players&amp;#x27; salaries and owners&amp;#x27; profits that can only exist because professional sports leagues operate in a somewhat inelastic market (you&amp;#x27;re not going to switch to watching ping pong just because it&amp;#x27;s cheaper).</text></comment>
<story><title>ESPN Loses 621,000 Subscribers; Worst Month in Company History</title><url>http://www.outkickthecoverage.com/espn-loses-621-000-subscribers-worst-month-in-company-history-102916</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IBM</author><text>Would you spend $25-35 per month for ESPN? Because that&amp;#x27;s what it would probably cost if it wasn&amp;#x27;t subsidized by the bundle.&lt;p&gt;Your answer to that question may in fact be yes, but the economics don&amp;#x27;t work out. Disney would make more money getting $6 from every cable subscriber than try to scratch and claw to scale up an OTT service like Netflix that would inevitably cannibalize their current business.&lt;p&gt;The only thing that will change the economics is when the market forces their hand, which is what this story is about.</text></item><item><author>Phlow</author><text>I would pay ESPN $10 a month for an ESPN streaming app that had access to all the college football games (no blackouts), alone, as long as it didn&amp;#x27;t require a cable subscription.  The current ESPN streaming app is garbage, compared to Netflix, and other on-demand interfaces.  It&amp;#x27;s not available on my Smart TV.  The quality of the streaming is terrible.  It&amp;#x27;s slow to bring up video.  The ads are repetitive and annoying, and it&amp;#x27;s a second class citizen with wait screens while local ads are up on broadcast.&lt;p&gt;Comcast recently decided to institute a 1TB&amp;#x2F;month cap in my area, with a charge of $10 per 50GB after up to $200, or $50 for unlimited (opt-in, by the sounds).  There are no technical reasons why they did this, it was entirely to gain more revenue to make up for the cord cutters.  Their own streaming service doesn&amp;#x27;t apply to their data cap.&lt;p&gt;The whole thing is garbage and needs to be completely changed.  The moment Google Fiber or something better comes along in my area, I&amp;#x27;m going internet only, and I&amp;#x27;ll just go without until they realize how badly they&amp;#x27;ve managed to move with the trends and start fixing it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomjakubowski</author><text>ESPN does more than just broadcast live sporting events.  They have to fill a whole 24 hours every day, so they also produce original programming (Sportscenter, PTI, Around the Horn, etc.).  The original shows are surely cheaper for ESPN to produce than the live stuff (broadcast rights are expensive), but many viewers get almost no value out of them in the Web era. (I can get my &amp;quot;hot takes&amp;quot; from Twitter and blogs, thank you very much.)&lt;p&gt;If I could pay &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; for ESPN&amp;#x27;s coverage of live events in $SPORTS_I_CARE_ABOUT, I would do that happily.  And I do pay for similar products, with my MLB.TV and NBA Game Time subscriptions, but that&amp;#x27;s only because I&amp;#x27;m lucky enough to live outside of my favorite teams&amp;#x27; blackout areas.  Even then, though, I miss out on national broadcasts, which are blacked out, and I have to either go to a bar or find an illegal stream on the Web to watch the game.</text></comment>