As media habits shift towards online streaming, sport is suffering with the rest of traditional television
By G.E. | NEW YORK
FOR much of this century ESPN, the television sports network, has been Disney’s cash machine, collecting billions more dollars from American subscribers each year than the company gets from its blockbuster “Star Wars”, Marvel and Pixar films combined. But for the past six years, fewer and fewer people have been paying for ESPN: the network’s subscribers base has declined from a peak of 100m households in 2011 to less than 88m now. Why are fewer Americans paying for the sports leader?
One big reason is that fewer people are subscribing to pay-television overall—a phenomenon known as “cord-cutting”. As the bundle of channels offered to homes has grown fatter, it has also become more expensive—the typical pay-TV bill in America has nearly doubled in a decade to more than $100 a month. This has turned off customers and potential customers. Sports fans can get highlights free on social media; non-sports fans can get their fix from Netflix and Amazon. ESPN is by far the most expensive channel in the bundle—the network gets paid $7.86 per subscriber, according to Kagan, a research firm, while no other basic cable channel commands even $2 per subscriber. Still, the cheaper channels are losing lots of subscribers too. TNT, owned by Time Warner, has lost more than 10m subscribers in the same period of time that ESPN has lost 12m.
