ESPN Preps for More Layoffs as Cordcutting Woes Continue → Re: It's more than just cord cutting...

Subscriber loss has almost nothing to do with politics, and is the sole reason they are losing revenue. The only way to not be a subscriber is to stop subscribing to basic cable/sat tv packages. I doubt very many people cut the cord just because of ESPN's politics. ESPN has made their money by forcing themselves on to every basic cable package. They have profited more than anyone else off this model, and they are falling the hardest as it falls apart.

They waited too long to join the streaming market. They should have been leading in making sports streams but they didn't.

The money isn't there in streaming since there is no way to make every household (even the ones that never watch them) pay $7-10/month.

That model was a huge cash cow, and probably the right business decision was to ride it as long as they could. The only criticism from a revenue standpoint was that their greed in continually raising their rates probably worked towards accelerating cord cutting.

I believe also once they start their own streaming then cable companies can then de-bundle it from basic cable. Disney may not allow it, but at the end of the day maybe the cable companies just resell the Disney bundle and make a few bucks on it.

The big elephant in the room is that ESPN paid WAY too much for sports rights. Sooner or later one of these folks default or renegotiate in secret but the days of has been quarterbacks making $15m a year are numbered (except maybe in Dallas).

The next step will be pulling content from Netflix and the like and put them all behind paywalls. The content wars will begin. People will get pissed and they will turn into dollar songs from $15 CD's.

Ultimately it will lead to better products but we are talking at least 5-7 years here.

100% agreed.

Absolutely. The whole market is beyond bloated, all the way down to the stadiums and colleges and their facilities and programs and whatnot. The whole market is based on unsustainable pricing for cable tv. The model worked great when cable was $30/mo, it was a good value, and now it's totally broken.

As the content providers get greedier and greedier, and MSOs aren't making much money off of TV anymore, the content providers seem unwilling to go back to square one and try and figure this whole system out in a sustainable way, so instead, cord cutting and cord shaving are going to bankrupt them and cause disintegration of the current model.

Americans will continue to watch TV, but they seem perfectly happy with local broadcast TV or Netflix and other streaming platforms over anything cable can offer. A few years ago, I thought cord cutting was a nutty idea, because of the cost of a la carte. However, in the meantime, the quality of content on cable has taken a nosedive (not that it was that great 5 years ago), and most of the good shows are gone, with all sorts of MTV-edited trash on the cable channels that's hard to even watch. The only thing left is sports, and how much are you willing to pay for sports?

It was never about a la carte. It was never about trying to acquire all the cable channels via a different route.

It was about realizing that what the pay TV system delivers has less and less value every year, as the shows get stupider and stupider and the price does nothing but skyrocket way faster than the inflation rate.

So as the value goes down, people simply stop doing that thing they were doing for many years, and change to doing something else. A la carte? Nope. I'll watch Netflix, thanks. Oh, Amazon is throwing in some video with my Prime membership that I'm going to have anyway? Bring it on.

A la carte is the straw man that the cable industry puts up to try to distract people from the real value equation discussion.

Cable delivers 400 channels--but if you did a study, you'd find that the vast majority of people pay attention to maybe 10 of those--and on a regular basis, actually watch maybe 5. But this is America! where MORE IS BETTER! so the cable industry dares you to get more channels for the price! never mind that the channels they're talking about are nothing but Kardashians and Honey Boo-Boo.

Well, the first iterations were all about a la carte, and that's why they made no sense. I'm talking 2012-2013ish. We've moved beyond that, and in the end, you're right. The quality kept going down on cable, and the price kept going up. And now a lot of the best shows are on Netflix or HBO.

I do mourn the loss of TLC, Discovery, History, etc. Not making History every day, not Honey Boo-Boo Chiiiiiiiiiild, not fake Alaskan nuts with giant beards, but what those channels were 10-15 years ago. Endless WWII documentaries. Actual science and technology content. It's sad that they have chosen to make themselves relatively irrelevant.

Worse yet, in some areas the taxpayers got stuck paying for the stadiums.

politics isn't the sole reason but it's going to accelerate it imo. Those who were on the fence about cord cutting because they didn't want to lose espn now have no reason to keep it anymore

I dropped ESPN as quickly as I could due to their liberal politics. I switched from Sling Orange to Sling Blue. Sling Orange gets ESPN, Sling Blue gets Fox Sports, so now my money goes to Fox Sports instead of ESPN. If a game is on that I really want to watch, I just go to my favorite sports bar to watch just the game.

Absolutely. Then they forced too many commercials into games to compensate. Then games became 3.5-4 hours, then the sports had to change their rules to shorten them up. ESPN and it's greed has singlehandedly ruined college sports forever.

Great. So now you can have fox sports tell you that your team is winning so much that you will be sick of it even though they are 0-16.

It has a lot to do with why they are losing viewers. That's what some of you are missing.

ESPN is what KEPT a lot of sports fans subscribed to cable in the first place, even when the prices went up. They didn't want to lose their sports coverage when cutting the cable. Now that ESPN has started turning off a lot of these viewers with inserting their views on things, instead of just covering it objectively, their disinterest in ESPN is starting to give them that reason to finally cut the cord.

The first part of your post is exactly right, the second part, exactly wrong. It's all about economics, not politics.

No, both parts of my statement are right. It IS about politics. People don't want politics in their sports. Why do you think the NFL ratings are tanking so bad this year with all the protests?

Sometime it's not all about the money.

I can't wait for Big Sports to get caught up in these bad contracts and political footballs, and try to monetize their way out by going the cableco route and collecting below the line fees.

"Yes sir, I realize you've been a season ticket holder for 30 years. But if you want to enter, you'll have to pay the $10 facility fee plus the $5 food availability fee. And if you want to buy beer, you'll have to pay $20 for the alcohol availability fee, to get the wristband that allows you to spend $10 on a 16 ounce beer."

I mean, didn't Washington already do this with their football stadium, not allowing people to walk onto the property because that would deny them the parking fees?

No, it's not. A few fringe right-wing whackjobs are not causing continued 1%+ year over year losses for pay TV. If anything, the right-wing whackjobs are helping pay TV, since they don't want to give up their actual fake news on Fox News.

Seriously? So instead of getting the admission fees but not the parking fees, they'd rather get neither?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

I watched ESPN and H2 on cable. H2 went away and ESPN became expendable. I'm sure I'm not the only one.