The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage

Nice article but there is something strange at how important he things vMVPDs are and unimportant other streaming services are.

That is, I had a fight with my RSS reader over whether or not soccer was interesting and my RSS reader won, which got me (1) reading about Premier League Football, (2) watching free games on OTA TV, (3) getting a Peacock subscription (my first streaming subscription), and (4) wondering about getting an Apple TV subscription to get Major League Soccer.

Peacock is cheap and it's not hard to justify to catch an extra game every weekend, but no way am I going to get a Fubo.TV subscription that costs 10x and I'd feel like a fool if I was paying big money to get a stream of my local network affiliates I can get for free OTA and also funding CNN, Fox News, and other channels I think are toxic.

Here’s another perspective

https://www.outkick.com/espn-charter-cable-bundle-sports/

One upstream factoid the article is missing: We are beginning to see sports team bypass networks like ESPN entirely. In the wake of Bally Sports breaking contracts with various teams, MLB started some distribution on its own.

I doubt this will go unnoticed by other sports leagues. These are interesting times.

> In Phase 4, though, a churned TV customer is still a broadband customer, because the Internet is a precondition for watching the vMVPD! Sure, a customer could be so incensed that they also change their Internet provider, but that is completely unnecessary and, given the inconvenience involved, highly unlikely.

95% of the US only having access to wired broadband via coaxial cable is more than just an inconvenience to switching ISPs. Charter and other coaxial cable ISPs know their broadband customers have nowhere to go.

The author is lamenting the decline of ESPN which will make everything worse, and half the ads on the page are for Fubo. Such sweet irony.

The thing is, I’m one of those people who never watched ESPN, yet paid for years for it in a cable package. Now I have some streaming packages I may not watch in a month, but at least I’m not paying $10/month for something I never watch.

The era of monopoly subsidized sports is coming to an end. Perhaps athlete salaries will come back down to Earth as well. They were only so high because the product was sold to so many people who didn’t want to buy it.

It’s the end of a golden era for some, but the end of a rent for me, and hurrah for that. I assume most sports leagues will adjust, rather than price themselves out of business. Or take Saudi money. Either way.

> For the record, I’m not great at math. The only math class I ever took in college was – and I’m not making this up – something called, “Mathematical Concepts,” It was me and every sorority girl at George Washington University.

> So it was the greatest class of my life.

I like sports writing so much better than sports. It’s a good article even if I’m not on the author’s side.