Its just plain justice. All these years ESPN was putting the screws to every carrier when it came to negotiate a contract.

Oh, you want ESPN? Well you better pay us $3/mo for the channel, plus you have to carry EPSN2, ESPNews, ESPNU, and a bunch of Disney channels and pay high dollar for them as well. Oh, have you have to put them in your cheaper tiers too so we have more viewers to bill to our advertisers. Oh, what you do you mean you can't afford to do that? Just raise your rates to cover it!

Now carriers are getting desperate enough to tell the mighty ESPN to pound sand so that they can offer 'cheap' plans again.

But I know that this revolution will not last long. The media companies will find the way to rope it all back in. I remember back in the 90s in the age of the independant ISP. Oh, these guys were going to put the phone companies out of business. Oh and those Cell phone companies are going to put the Bell companies out of business. Nope, the phone and cable companies now own the internet and your access to it. Same will be true will all of this 'cord cutting'. In a few years, Netflix and all other streaming outlets will get new owners. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Sure you may cut your TV cord, but you will be making up for it with new CAPs on your ISP cord. Oh, and do you like your commercial free netflix? Yep, I remember when CableTV was taking off in the early 80s and guess what? One of its biggest selling points was that it was commercial free.

I never ever watched ESPN. I don't care about sports. But as a cable subscriber, I paid for it nonetheless. When I cut the cord, I no longer pay for something I don't need. ESPN loses a subscriber, but not a viewer.

I'm sure a good number of the 92 million people still saddled with ESPN never watch it now. This number will only shrink as people move away from cable.

With all the tricks cable co's use to hide cord cutting numbers (ie, locals+internet is usually cheaper than standalone internet even if you don't watch your local tv package), this is more indicative of where the industry is going.

There's nothing really ESPN can do to stem the losses at this point. They rode the gravy train of getting everyone to pay their expensive carriage fees whether they watched the channel or not, as long as they could. Internet options make it so people can finally watch TV without being forced to pay for espn and RSNs. I imagine the RSNs are going to be hit pretty hard shortly too, especially with all the very lucrative, long term rights deals handed out recently.

They insisted on bundling ESPN with other crappy channels and charge more to content providers per subscriber. Sooner or later this was going to happen. People got tired of the black outs between ESPN and U-Verse, DirectTV, Dish Network, etc.

How can ESPN charge what they do for ads when they cannot guarantee the eyeballs on them??? Just because they forced everyone to pay for it with basic cable doesn't mean you have people watching, anymore than FOX NEWS did when they claimed they had millions of subscribers - what they have are millions of slaves forced to pay for a channel they may not want in exchange for paying for what they do want. Forced bundling really should have been made illegal. Judges had to have been on the take when they mad that decision. (My legally entitled opinion)