Posted on 08/05/2016 12:29:44 PM PDT by Zakeet
In the past five years ESPN has lost 11,346,000 subscribers according to Nielsen data.
If you combine that with ESPN2 and ESPNU subscriber losses this means that ESPN has lost over a billion dollars in cable and satellite revenue just in the past five years, an average of $200 million each year. That total of a billion dollars hits ESPN in the pocketbook not just on a yearly basis, but for every year going forward.
It's gone forever.
That's not just bad, this is downright cataclysmic.
And it's getting worse.
In the past year ESPN lost 4.159 million subscribers, that's another $350 million in lost revenue across the ESPN family of networks.
[Snip]
I'm not trying to be alarmist here, but the simple fact is this -- I don't see how ESPN's business model makes sense at all by 2021.
The "Worldwide Leader in Sports" is a dead channel walking.
(Excerpt) Read more at outkickthecoverage.com ...
In my area, ESPN is part of the cable package. I don’t believe that I can get the package w/o ESPN.
So, in short, I try to avoid watching it. Their PC attitude (ex: giving Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner the Arthur Ashe Courage Aaward) has gotten to be waaay too much.
If it wasn’t for their coverage of college football and the College World Series, I doubt I’d watch it at all.
True. Plus I think that there is a general movement toward “dumping cable”. How wold you know the motivation? Is there just one?
ESPN jumped the shark a while ago.
Indeed, it is Exhibit A in how to jump the shark. MTV too.
They sent a black columnist to cover Wimbledon on air, so he could drool over the Williams sisters - the guy had ZERO tennis background, was solely there due to skin color and his agenda as far as I could tell.
But luckily that is the only recent time I’ve even turned to ESPN.
While Olberman was an absolute moron poltical commentator, he is actually not bad as a sports guy.
I’ve given up pro sports altogether because of the leftist bias they keep injecting at every opportunity. That and the needless insertion of women everywhere into men’s sports (please ladies, we love you, but we need a break from time to time).
Now if the same can happen to Sports Illustrated.
I remember ESPN being left wing in the 80’s.
When he and Dan Patrick first started they were funny. But then they (mostly he) started to get mega-snarky thinking he was much funnier than he was.
Years ago there was a certain channel that I didn't want in my house. I called the cable company and requested that they turn it off. They told me they couldn't because it was part of the standard package.
So I told them that I wanted them to turn the standard package off if they couldn't turn off just 1 channel. They asked me to hold and came back after a few minutes and told me that the specific channel was now off.
They didn't want to lose me as a subscriber so they gave in. They lost me anyway after about a year. No more TV and I love it.
Back when it was Keith and Dan Patrick that was classic sports comedy commentary. Keith decided somewhere along the line that he could use that same wit and add his liberal crap to do social/politcal commentary for the other networks. It hasn’t worked out so well for him...
We stopped watching ESPN years ago. Even today, I will not watch it even if nothing else is on. Nice to know that you are part of something like a boycott that works. Couldn’t be happier.
I literally never watch ESPN. From the very small samples I saw previously, its worse than CNN with headline and narrative overkill. Also, as far as I can tell, they completely ignore the National Hockey League.
Let’s hope ESPN disappears.
The fleeing could NOT have hit a better place!!!
Remember when Rush Limbo was canned ???
In my area, ESPN is part of the cable package. I don’t believe that I can get the package w/o ESPN.
So, in short, I try to avoid watching it. Their PC attitude (ex: giving Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner the Arthur Ashe Courage Aaward) has gotten to be waaay too much.
If it wasn’t for their coverage of college football and the College World Series, I doubt I’d watch it at all.
Well, you wouldn’t know the motivation and that’s my point. The headline of that post was very misleading. Nothing in the links provided mentions political motivation as a reason for leaving ESPN.
And you’re right - cable is being hurt across the spectrum by streaming television, Apple TV, Google, Netflix, Amazon, Roku, etc. etc....
ESPN is small potatoes for Disney, but the drop is one of the main reasons for Disney’s sinking stock price. I’m not impartial here as I’m a shareholder. But not to go too far off subject, ESPN is mostly just “Sports News”. Sports broadcasting is largely teflon coated. People will always want to watch. ESPN has its core with men over 20 and teenage boys. But people that never watch the channel regardless of content, who are now free to drop it, will certainly do so.
How fast would I drop Oprah if it weren’t bundled? :)
I refuse to watch a college football game with a lesbian announcer.
The Radio! Listen to major bowl games and college regular season games!
Their radio talk shows are nauseatingly PC as well.
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