ESPN Can't Afford to Go on Like This

121 点作者 jsm386大约 8 年前

20 条评论

kbos87大约 8 年前

As a millennial consumer (rolling my own eyes but it's true) who cut the cord, the biggest thing that pushed me toward doing so was seeing all of the sports channels I was paying for and never had an ounce of desire to watch. The way my cable company breaks out a mandatory $15 fee for ESPN specifically was the nail in the coffin. Personally, sports programming was dragging the already shaky value prop of the cable industry down much further.

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bilbo0s大约 8 年前

Many posts here fail to address one very salient point. And I don't think we can overstate the importance of it.Most "sports" fans are generally not "sports" fans. They are STANFORD fans. Or Arkansas fans. Or Michigan fans. Or Packers fans. Or Golden State fans. Or what have you.The pure football fan is rare. As is the pure baseball or hockey fan. Most fans are normally watching because they want to see their team. There certainly is a sub-demographic that are sports fans. These are people who watch every game of their chosen sport looking for tactics and strategy. Most, however, are watching because Manchester United is playing. Or because they like the Cleveland Cavaliers. Or they're fans of the Boston Red Wings. Or maybe PSG. You get the idea.What I'm getting at is that sports coverage would need be more personalized than ESPN is capable of in its current form if it wants to be of value to consumers today.It boils down to this...Why should one have to pay for ESPN if one doesn't watch it?Firstly, if you are not a fan of any team or school or city at all, then nothing in heaven or earth would get you to watch ESPN anyway. So making any changes to appease non sports fans is a foolish endeavor. Those resources are best deployed producing content that non sports fans would like to consume. I don't pretend to know what that looks like, but I'm certain it doesn't look like ESPN.Now let's say for the sake of argument that a person is a fan of some team or school or city. I'll take myself as an example. I might watch my alma mater play a few football games, and if they go to the basketball tournament then I watch that. Sometimes I watch the super bowl, maybe, but I have never watched a Halftime show.Now... why would a "sports" fan like that, which is the majority of us, pay $15 to $20 a month (MANDATORY) for an entire year when they only want to watch MAYBE 6 to 12 games between football and basketball that are usually not on ESPN anyway??? Answer: They shouldn't pay. And I'd imagine most of them won't in the future.ESPN will need to offer more customization. Be it through live streaming or time shifting or whatever. I'm not an expert, but I think the days of forcing a $20 fee on people every month for non personalized sports coverage are just not sustainable long term.

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nnfy大约 8 年前

I don't watch sports networks of any kind, but I've seen anecdotes online that ESPN, especially sportscenter, is losing viewers because of politicization of content, where people just want sports talk.

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andr3w321大约 8 年前

The problem with sports broadcasting nowadays is twofold1. Viewing games costs too much2. The commentary for said games sucksI'd happily watch a random MLB game on a Tuesday, but sorry I am not going to spend $113/season to watch on MLB TV. The NFL is the worst. If you're out of the US you can purchase and stream games for $200/season or so, but for in the US you have to have directTV to get all the games which isn't even offered for many possible subscribers or spend $30 in beer/food for lunch at a sportsbar with no audio for your game. If I'm at home I have the choice of the local game and maybe one other random national game and if both of these games are blowouts I'm tuning out.People want to watch their team play. They don't even mind commercials as long as there's not TOO many of them. The NFL is reaching their limit. NFL viewership has peaked. 2016 ratings declined 8%. Watching a touchdown followed by a commercial followed by a kickoff touchback followed by a commercial is too much. The only way to grow a sport is to grow viewership and fans and the only way to do that is make content cheap, easy to access and enjoyable to watch which brings us to the commentary.The future of sports and money in sports is in the live aspect and in the commentary. I want to watch a football game commented by Conan O'Brian or Snoop Dogg or even some entertaining twitch or youtuber not Al Michaels and Phil Simms. Why not collect royalties on commentary streams? Let 1000s of people pay for the rights to comment on an NFL game and let the viewers decide who they want to listen to commentary from. Its absurd that in 2017 people still resort to reddit.com/NFLstreams or NHLstreams to watch some low res game with pop up ads everywhere with commentary from two old white guys.Once viewership increases, ad money will increase which would offset the streaming fees the leagues would be missing out on by providing their content for free. If ESPN would simply show sports and provide interesting commentary from interesting individuals I would watch around the clock.

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tells大约 8 年前

I think the criticisms of ESPN and the advent of cord-cutting is severely missing a larger issue at hand. Sports are just another form of entertainment for people. I can probably safely say that the decline of ESPN first started with the rise of well-produced TV shows on HBO, AMC, Netflix, etc. I believe it's more than just correlation.Just like a captivating TV series, sports demands your attention to the details and personal stories for you to become a fan. However, sporting events take hours to ingest at a time and the outcome leave many disappointed. People who have money to spend are typically people with fewer hours to allocate for entertainment. With the rise of quality TV shows that take one hour to consume, how do sports like baseball stand a chance at gaining new viewers?The best thing ESPN has going for it are its 30 for 30 documentaries. A well produced documentary series. However, documentaries generally don't bring in huge sums of cash. If they can pivot to a create must-see dramatic show with a sports theme, they may have a chance.

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vr46大约 8 年前

I'm seeing strong parallels between bundled channels that people don't necessarily want and Monty Python's Spam Sketch,Cable Companies: "Well there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam; or lobster thermidor aux crevettes, with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and a fried egg on top and spam."Consumers: "Have you got anything without spam in it?"Cable Companies: "Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam. That's not got MUCH spam in it."Ad nauseam...

tomohawk大约 8 年前

Sports is one of the very few things people can totally devote themselves to without being threatened. You can talk about sports at work without worrying about getting fired. You can talk about sports at a party and not lose friends.At least you used to be able to.The more sports wanders from just sports into social, political, or even partisan issues, the less it is actually about sports.Associating these other things with sports destroys the value. It makes it so sport is no longer an escape, but instead becomes yet another politicized venue.Here's some other interesting theories as to why ESPN is having trouble.<a href="http://thefederalist.com/2017/04/26/the-real-story-behind-espns-wednesday-massacre/" rel="nofollow">http://thefederalist.com/2017/04/26/the-real-story-behind-es...</a>

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douche大约 8 年前

It's symptomatic of the general decline in television across the last couple of decades.MTV - when was the last time you saw a music video?History - Apparently "History" now includes bizarre religious crackpottery, ancient aliens, and idiots buying and selling things in Las Vegas.A&E - "Arts and Entertainment" is apparently all about terrible people and Honey Boo-Boo.Discovery - Remember science and wildlife documentaries? Neither does the Discovery Channel.TLC - ugh. Dwarfs and tattoos and people with way too many children.SyFy - We can't even spell anymore, and SHARKNADO!

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jjcm大约 8 年前

I wonder if the prominence of esports is cutting into ESPN as well. Hell just yesterday there were over a million viewers on Twitch[1], in large due to a major esports tournament for dota. League of Legends regularly hits those numbers and beyond for their tournaments.In the past esports were kinda sideshow attractions, but now the production quality and audience numbers are quickly catching up to traditional sports. On top of that their distribution models are more consumer friendly. I'm sure there's overlap of people who watch both, but I wonder if the next generation of kids will defer to esports over traditional ones.[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/68heiu/600k_viewers_wow/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/68heiu/600k_viewers_...</a>

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bitL大约 8 年前

I read on some forums that guys were canceling ESPN due to too many female presenters commenting on sports they weren't passionate/knowledgeable about, and pushing political agenda. Could that be a compounding factor for a major loss of subscribers where many viewers decided it's no longer worth watching and found more active outlets in their spare time?

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jgalt212大约 8 年前

Why is ESPN under such pressure, but sports franchise values seem to be still increasing? Aren't they competing/sharing the same dollar?

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theprop大约 8 年前

It looks like ESPN's "$6.4 billion in 2014" in profit is pre-tax, so it generated $4+ billion in cash that year leading an analyst to value ESPN at $50 billion three years ago ( <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2014/04/29/the-value-of-espn-surpasses-50-billion/#28f7088561f5" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2014/04/29/the-...</a> )Probably not anymore... It does point to Netflix eventually making a lot of money and being worth a lot more than it currently is. Netflix doesn't have ad revenue (in addition to such huge consumer fees, ESPN had nearly $4 billion a year in ad revenue in 2014 at least) but its subscription fees are comparable to ESPN. Better for Netflix is its aggressive move into its own content generation. If it was "merely" a way to watch other companies content, it would be at the mercy of those content owners the way ESPN pays a king's ransom for NFL, NBA, etc. games. ESPN's strategy to focus on opinion (original content) makes a lot of sense in terms of retaining fans and having a business that could survive losing broadcasting rights for a lot of sports.While sports team/network owners could go direct to fans fairly easily these days with 1000 tv channels and everyone having "Smart" TVs, they're probably better off under the ESPN umbrella both as a bundle of many sports and through aggregated ad sales.

easilyBored大约 8 年前

It pays too much for content and costs too much for consumers.It paid too much because it could even more for it on resale. Bigger fool. They'll realign as contracts start to expire. Meanwhile they had a great run, until people awoke up to the scam.

elmerland大约 8 年前

Why would they make less money by moving to a streaming model? I would imagine more people would go and buy just that instead of getting a cable package. They can also start charging a reasonable amount based on what it costs to produce the content.If right now they rely on people paying for the channel but not watching it. Wouldn't switching to a streaming model mean that advertisers would be more interested because more people were actually watching the channel and saw ads?

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epynonymous大约 8 年前

could not rtfa because of the china gfw, but i'd venture a guess that netflix and all the other download based services are hurting cable sales. anyone who cannot move in this direction will face declines in revenue. everything i need i can stream. i dont want a potpouri of channels, just give me nba, or nat geo. to be fair, espn does have a streaming service, but i've been out of the us for too long to understand it. it was probably too late to the game and it probably has complicated rules if you own cable already where you'd get charged twice if you wanted it or had to go through some cable company's crappy app to get the stream.i guess the other thing is the inflation set by all these pseudo celebreties or ex-players, they must have demanded a lot. some of these guys are worth it, but probably not most of them.for the record, i used to watch sportscenter everyday before work, and i'd often times watch it twice in row just to see all the highlights and witty commentary. sure i sometimes had to flips channels through the hockey or golf highlights, but most if the other content was good. i enjoyed the shows like pardon the interruption and nfl countdown, so there was quality content. now when i take business trips back home, i still turn on and enjoy sportscenter, so i dont think it's the content, probably more so the packaging and over pricing of the package, look at the nba tv deal.laying off should help reduce long term costs, but that doesnt solve their primary issue which is where the industry is going due to new tech innovations from netflix, hulu, etc. nba league pass is a great example, i just want to watch nba, i get access to all games, post game interviews, and commentary. i can imagine this being the future, more customized content, deeper, not a melting pot of sports news.

__Joker大约 8 年前

There is also bundling of other sports. As a fan of, say, NBA , I really don't care about all the NFL broadcast. Still those prices paid by me.Future to me seems, where there will be option to subscribe or buy ticket to individual events like, say only this weekend's match between team A and team B. And it seems it is more and more possible.

spcelzrd大约 8 年前

Kind of buried near the end of the article, but as ESPN moves away from sports reporting in favor of opinion there might be some great opportunity for alternative reporting. Deadspin comes to mind.

grecy大约 8 年前

"Watching professional sports is just watching other people have the time of their lives".If you have cable, you are paying for that privilege.

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user5994461大约 8 年前

Damn. I thought this had something to do with the Sony Playstation Network.

losteverything大约 8 年前

People learn to love sports growing up. My millenial children didn't and they won't/ didn't pick it up as an adult.Anytime i see a Bloomberg article on hn i read it.