Bloomberg:
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.
It was always assumed sports would be immune from cord cutters because there was no other way to get sports live. The pundits ignored the fact people simply aren’t watching live sports as much.
I think a big part of their losses also include people who don’t watch sports at all but had to pay for ESPN because they didn’t have a choice. I pretty much fall into this bucket, while I watch some sports, I only watch games, I don’t care about live commentary etc and the games I do watch don’t air on ESPN with very very few exceptions. So for me ESPN was an easily expendable channel.
yeah sports. no way Ima pay a bunch of money to watch some millionaires working for billionaires toss a ball around.
Not only are you and mau47 right, but there are people like me who watch some sports but have streaming options now. For example, I can pay Sling to get ESPN and others during football season and then stop that once football is over with. I wanted to watch March Madness, so I resubscribed to Sling… and will cancel now.
Then combine all of that with the fact that you can get sport specific apps without any cable for all of the sports pretty much (aside from the NFL and much of college football and that’s coming along .
What this really means is that all the channels that are in a specific “package” have also lost millions of subscribers since 2011 too. People that do keep cable are probably opting for the “economy” or lower lineups.
I don’t think it helps that ESPN doesn’t have many live sports events in the line up. It is mostly historical games, commentaries, talkshows, etc. Tentpole shows like SportsCenter have faced competition from web content.
Two years ago Verizon FiOS allowed me to drop all sports channels from my subscription.
I really only care about futbol (the real kind, where you actually play with your feet), and I have to subscribe to other services or catch it on Telemundo and Univision. ESPN’s catch all just doesn’t fit what I care to pay for. I don’t need 5 or 6 channels of various sports to get a few futbol games scattered here and there.
I watch sports but not much on ESPN. Monday night football occasionally. They don’t have much soccer. So I can live without. I would pay for ESPN on AppleTV if the price was right. I think it’s $15 now and that’s not the right price.
Frankly, I’m just not as impressed with ESPN’s coverage as I used to be. They do fine with their live sports coverage, but “fine” means they simply provide a means to watch a live event reliably. Their play by play announcers, color analysts, and misc reporters don’t bring what they did back in the mid to late 90s.
I used to watch the three straight hours of sportscenter in college because Dan Patrick, Kenny Mayne, and Stuart Scott were so good that they demanded my attention. SBNation, Bleacher Report and local guys from back home demand my attention now. They also tend to be more accurate with the teams I follow as well.
To me, ESPN is losing subscribers for two reasons. Their product simply isn’t as good as it used to be, and people are able to have them left off of subscription packages.
That’s not entirely true. They have Monday and Sunday night baseball, Monday night football, Friday night basketball, etc. just to start, and a lot of other stuff (tennis, etc.) I watch quite a bit of live sports on ESPN (via PlayStation Vue, which gives 60fps on my iPhone 6+ as well as my original iPad mini, which is pretty awesome).
Whether or not that’s sufficient to maintain a population is another question entirely, and it appears not as much as we thought.
Just a reminder that “foot” has more than one meaning….
Count me among the people who stopped paying for cable in part because of bundling that includes channels like ESPN.
ESPN costs more to cable companies than any other TV package. Yet, operators would never consider abandoning it because it is just to important to their overall packaging of content.
Now, with a whole new germination not caring about the programming, and certainly not willing to invest the bucks or the time to consume it, ESPN will have a very difficult time.
I will be curious to see what happens to sports programming when the money dries up. There’s a new NBA agreement out because that greedy league sees dollar signs.
Prospects will be a ghost of itself when the money runs out.
They certainly have some live sports, but as others have mentioned even the live sports they have are pretty sparse. I think that’s largely down to the most popular US sports being team sports. For team sports people tend to want to see the games of their favorite teams and that tends to mean local network stations or special subscriptions. A national network has a hard time getting a good foothold in that landscape. Especially when they can’t really compete with networks for the big tentpole events like the Olympics or Super Bowl.
I cut the cord a long time ago. Apart from Baseball, I also don’t follow any sports at all anymore. As for Baseball, I get it direct internet streamed from my MLB.TV subscription. The quality and value of the subscription is top notch and I look forward to the new season that is about to get under way
Play Ball!
Soccer
Thanks for the translation. Pretty much every country in the world except for Britain and the US call it football/fútbol or even “footy.”
US football is closer to rugby, and probably should be called US Rules Rugby.