11 ms·

The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop

153 points by gabbo 11y ago

howeyc 11y ago
Doubtful. ESPN is not synonomous with Sports. People may be becoming aware of the amount of their cable bill being sent to ESPN, but there are two problems blocking change. 1) They (the cable subscriber) can't do shit about it, they either accept the whole packege or not. 2) Why would the cable companies go for it anyway, I'm sure they know they can get more by forcing HGTV lovers to pay for ESPN, and ESPN lovers forced to pay for HGTV. Also, let's say this author is right, ESPN dies a slow death. How does that stop sports? ESPN doesn't have much (of the main sports) on it anyway. Sports games are on other networks. NFL - CBS,FOX. MLB - FOX,TBS. Soccer - NBC. NHL - NBC. I'm sure the sports that are on ESPN can find an home elsewhere. I'm not sure the dog shows are raking in huge TV money from ESPN that some PETS CHANNEL can't cover.
- brianlweiner 11y ago
  For baseball at least, the same points are valid for each area's RSN (regional sports network). MASN (Maryland / DC / VA area) gets something like $8-12 per subscriber. YES (NY Yankees network) I'm sure is able to charge even more. This has allowed MLB teams to spend a great deal of money in the past 5-10 years as teams have signed ever-more-lucrative television rights deals with FoxSports and others. If non-cable media packages are luring more and more cable subscribers (HBO, Hulu+, SlingTV, Netflix, etc) the pool of non-sports watching people subsidizing these networks shrinks - this will force either prices to rise for actual sports watching customers, or it'll lower revenues for teams. Rumor has it that MLB has been trying to push the RSNs to accept universal MLB.tv access for all regional markets, this at least makes the costs explicit - $100-140/season for each subscriber.
  - Nelson69 11y ago
    There is more synergy there though. RSNs show more games with the team you like. It only makes sense to charge more and the fans are more than willing to typically pay it.
- michaelbuckbee 11y ago
  I think a summary might be that: 1. ESPN historically was making way more money than they should due to bundling. 2. ESPN is passing along a large percentage of this money to the sports teams in the form of media rights (aka they pay the NFL teams to show Monday Night Football). 3. ESPN is now on a downward path due to people opting out of bundles. 4. Sports teams will make less money overall after this shakes out as ESPN artificially bid up the market.
- myNXTact 11y ago
  It seems to me that the "death of ESPN" is more evidence of the death of the cable TV model than the death of sports.
  - ssharp 11y ago
    This is probably true but I think ESPN is leading the pack because of how bloated they are. They run multiple channels 24/7 and a ton of their content is studio analysis-type shows, most of which I find absolutely terrible. I'm sure they have reasons for how they select and utilize the talent they have, but aside from a few writers and commentators, I have a hard time watching or reading anything they produce. I was hoping they'd eventually figure out a way to do more Grantland-produced television, where someone with some journalistic and creative taste, as well as more creative freedom could develop, but that obviously did not happen. Maybe Bill Simmons will be able to do that with HBO and finally create a legit competitor to ESPN's non-live sports programming.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      > I was hoping they'd eventually figure out a way to do more Grantland-produced television, where someone with some journalistic and creative taste, as well as more creative freedom could develop, but that obviously did not happen. Maybe Bill Simmons will be able to do that with HBO and finally create a legit competitor to ESPN's non-live sports programming. Their 30 for 30 films are awesome (thanks to Bill Simmons though, we'll see if it continues).
  - VLM 11y ago
    The other death of sports issue was very carefully not mentioned in the article... look at the median age of baseball fans over the past decades. Its literally a dying sport, as in the fans are aging and dying and not being replaced. Obviously not an issue for some of the other sports. However being a sports nerd in the sitcom stereotype sense is definitely a boomer and pre-boomer generational thing, not so much with younger people, and old people have a way of dying off. The biggest mistake the article made was conflating sport related spending with the housing bubble. The housing bubble blew because the last entrants into the ponzi were tapped out. The cost of sports is microscopic in comparison and very few people give up cable because they're completely and utterly tapped out. They just spend the $100 on something else. Probably a smartphone and some subscription services. Certainly the last entrant into the ponzi of paying a billion bucks for a team on the assumption you'll sell to a greater fool at two billion has not been reached, nor has the very last new sports fan been born yet. The biggest oversight in articles of this type is no one wants to discuss bundling. The kind of business that forces all video subscribers to pay $30/mo for sports even if they're not sports fans, could, with just a couple clicks on a keyboard, change the bundle so all the cablemodem subscribers pay the same $30 extra for their cablemodem, but now it comes with free ESPN video or some kind of web access deal. There are, after all, only a handful of monopoly providers. So either pay $30 for ESPN, or disconnect yourself from the internet. Trying to avoid paying for sports is like trying to avoid paying for organized crime. Or disorganized crime, for that matter. Unfortunately you can either pay up, or leave the geography and culture entirely. The government and corporations certainly are not going to help us because they are the organized crime in this analogy.
- bluedino 11y ago
  I can get quality streams of any NFL game online without much searching. Almost all the sites have donation buttons. Sure, I'd pay the NFL $99 for the Sunday ticket package. Take DirecTV out of the picture. That's only a couple bucks per week.
- osi 11y ago
  My takeaway point was the nearly $40/mo each cable subscriber pays towards sports programming in aggregate. One of the reasons I cut the cord was the transparent fee Comcast had added (and hiked) related to Chicago-area local sports. As people that don't care about sports on TV ditch cable for streaming, that will just increase the budget pressure on all sports networks.
- jonknee 11y ago
  ESPN is certainly synonymous with sports. They also show a ton of sports, including the NFL (Monday Night Football) and MLB (multiple nights a week), NBA (multiple nights a week), NCAA basketball (almost every night), NCAA Football (every week and a ton of bowl games).
- maxerickson 11y ago
  There is presumably a level of demand for smaller bundles that would cause the cable companies to make changes. If there is, the change probably happens incredibly swiftly.
- bradleyankrom 11y ago
  Plus, most of the major sports leagues have developed their own cable networks (MLB Network, NFL Network, etc.).
spo81rty 11y ago
I never have understood why we pay for cable channels to then watch ads on them. They should be able to make some decent money just on the ads.
- mikegioia 11y ago
  Not only that, but have you ever counted the commercial minutes for an NFL game? I had to turn the game off mid-way through because I couldn't take it anymore. Something like 60-70% of the 3.5 hours are spent on commercials.
  - dbot 11y ago
    Try NFL Redzone, that's a great experience. No commercials, just cutting from game to game and showing the action. I had it the past few years but didn't get it this year (due to frustrating bundling issues), and I agree that watching a single game is pretty terrible.
  - drumdance 11y ago
    This is what Reddit is for. :-) The live game threads offer hilarious commentary on the commercials and announcers.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    NFL is just awful. From the commercials as you mention to making it all video game-like with the wooshes and whoops and graphics all over the screen. I just can't watch it. The commercials that are aired during sporting events make me feel like my IQ drops 30 points just watching them. No, can't do it. No NFL for me.
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      There's also the issue of CTE, which made me stop watching any football at any level.
- drumdance 11y ago
  Waaaaay back in the late seventies or early eighties, can't remember exactly when, I remember reading an article about how cable would get rid of commercials altogether and people would be able to vote via interactive TV for what show they wanted to watch. It only took 35 years but here we are.
spo81rty 11y ago
I also like the model of paying for the sports we want. I don't mind paying $50 a year to watch all MLS games and I can watch them on any device.
- alistairSH 11y ago
  Agreed. The only sport I watch with regularity is professional cycling. Aside from the Tour, there was little to no coverage on any cable network (in the US). So I cancelled cable TV, saved $100/month. Put some of that money into Netflix. And pay for streaming coverage of cycling events as-needed.
jmnicolas 11y ago
Here is my prediction for 2016 : the bubble of bubbles is about to pop !
ssharp 11y ago
The NBA just entered a massive television deal that kicks in next year. Since player's salaries are tied to the amount of revenue the league makes, a lot of players stand to make upwards of 50% more than they make now. It's a massive deal, so it's hard to swallow any impending doom. I just think viewership will continue adjusting where they get their content from. I haven't seen anything about changes to streaming in the new deal other than the contract leaves the issue open for negotiating a joint-partnership that could supersede previous limitations, which included teams in your local market, nationally televised games, and the playoffs. I absolutely love NBA basketball and although I don't watch a ton of it, it probably makes up for 90% of my television watching while it's in season. But I have to pay a cable bill upwards of $100 / month to do so. I really hope professional sports follows the decoupling model and offers higher-value streaming options in the future. The NFL's online offering is equally restricting, but local NFL games are generally broadcast over-the-air, so you can pick them up with an antenna, making cord-cutting easier.
- harryh 11y ago
  You should look into NBA League Pass. $200 for everything.
  - ssharp 11y ago
    In the US, League Pass doesn't get you your local team, the national games, or any of the playoffs. I know outside of the US, they offer an international version that has it all and seems great, but they can't do that because of television deals in the US.
  - fredleblanc 11y ago
    The current problem with all of these deals is blacked out games. I subscribe to the NHL GameCenter (same thing, different sport) and for the money you pay, the things you can't watch are ridiculous (it's worse than the NBA one). Only out of market games are allowed, no nationally televised games (always considered "in market," even if they're showing on obscure channels), and the NHL doesn't give you any of the post season. I follow an out of town team that's bad, so it works for me. It's the weird straddling of "old model" and "new model," and the big players trying to catch up while keeping contracts happy. Up until this year, for example, when I watched my team play on their home channel, I'd get all the commercials too. So, same as being in-state. Now I just get a message about a commercial break. The weird crux of it all is that you can watch many of the games if you want to wait 48 hours after the broadcast ends. However, in a world so connected, even not being on social media, even following a team 2,000 miles away from me, it's still hard to be purposefully oblivious to what's happening. I was sorta hoping the next round of contracts would leap the content divide and make streaming a first-class citizen along the rest (I don't mind watching commercials while streaming, I'd assume that would just make those spots even more lucrative.) But it looks like we're still a couple years away from that.
SixSigma 11y ago
In Other News Discovery expects Eurosport app to reach one million subs in two years Discovery Communications Chief Executive David Zaslav said he expects its Eurosport Group's player app to reach one million subscribers in two years and that it will bring an additional $100 million in revenue. "It's a big initiative," he said about the Eurosport app. Discovery took a controlling ownership position in the European sports broadcaster last year. The app currently counts about 200,000 subscribers. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-discovery-eurosport-idUSKBN0MR27S20150331 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-discovery-eurosport-idUSKB... Disclosure: I have been a subscriber since 2012, it costs about $5 a month. It is the only "tv" I watch. You get 2 regular sports channels. At the moment it is mostly Winter Sports: Alpine Skiing, Biathlon, Ski-jumping etc. With Snooker & Tennis. Summer is two wheeled action: Tour de France, World Superbikes plus World Touring Cars, Tennis, and a whole host of sports you can't get anywhere else. We even had minority sports like American Monday Night Football ;) http://www.eurosportplayer.co.uk/tvschedule-month.shtml http://www.eurosportplayer.co.uk/tvschedule-month.shtml
- Practicality 11y ago
  Sorry, Eurosport Player is not available in this country. :(
drpgq 11y ago
Canada is switching to a la carte pricing for cable channels soon. Personally I'm planning on keeping a fair number of the sports channels and ditching a lot of the cruft that has built up over the years on the typical Canadian bundle.
petercooper 11y ago
Here in the UK, sports channels are always an optional (and quite expensive) extra - it seems to work. Same with movie channels.
- robk 11y ago
  Yeah but in the UK consumers are used to public viewing in pubs. The USA has a far less developed sports bar market.
  - osi 11y ago
    <insert generic comment about suburban living and drinking and driving> Sports bars are very alive and well in Chicago. Atypical for the US as a whole.
  - mark-r 11y ago
    That's probably changing. The falling price of TVs means any bar that wants can have them wall-to-wall. It's getting hard to escape them.
- ascagnel_ 11y ago
  The same is true in the US. You have your "free" terrestrial service (BBC, Channel 4, et al. vs the "big four" of ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC funded by ads) that show a few sporting events on weekends, but for anything beyond that you'll need to have an expensive cable or satellite bundle. For example: the BBC shows some F1 races in their entirety and the rest are aired as highlight packages after-the-fact, while all races are shown on Sky Sports F1. In the US, NBC airs a select few races in their entirety (Monaco, Canada, and the US GP), while NBCSN shows the rest of the races live as well as tape-delay full-race repeats. NBC can be accessed over-the-air for free, but NBCSN is typically an add-on to a cable bundle, so you're paying $60+/mo to have access to that channel for (if you're only an F1 fan) at most 12 hours of content a month.
  - petercooper 11y ago
    Yeah, but I have every satellite channel /except/ the sports and movie channels. It seems like ESPN gets bundled in as default with any extended package in the US. In the UK, sport is something you quite specifically have to sign up for - it doesn't get bundled with anything else because they assume not everyone is into sports.
brianwawok 11y ago
Sports is the main reason I don't have cable. Would I pay $20 for a few HGTV channels, and a few Discovery channels, and HBO? Sure. Would I pay $50 for the same + 20 sports channels? Nope, sports have 0 value to me. Not a huge loss though, netflix helps make up for missing content.
- jonknee 11y ago
  And you can get HBO without getting cable.
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    Are you referring to HBO Now? Because no, I cannot just go online and order HBO Now because I am not a Verizon nor Optimum subscriber. http://help.hbonow.com/app/answers/detailHBO/a_id/172 http://help.hbonow.com/app/answers/detailHBO/a_id/172
    - jonknee 11y ago
      Umm, yea you can. You can buy it through the app, no Verizon/Optimim needed. They probably have some clause in their contracts with cable companies that they won't directly sell access, but you can go through Google/Amazon/Apple just fine. http://help.hbonow.com/app/answers/detailHBO/a_id/125/rec/1 http://help.hbonow.com/app/answers/detailHBO/a_id/125/rec/1 > HBO NOW is a stand-alone streaming service that you can purchase from a participating provider (not part of a cable subscription).
      - jdmichal 11y ago
        The subscriptions are handled through in-app purchases. I cannot load any of those apps onto my existing devices. So now I have to buy a device, so that I can subscribe to HBO Now? The point is that the blanket statement, "And you can get HBO without getting cable," is correct but not complete. You still must flow through a provider, and the providers are not universally available. A random person with an internet connection and a computer cannot order HBO Now.
skrowl 11y ago
I cut the cord 5 years ago now. I haven't looked back. Live sports is really the ONLY thing I miss, but you can go out to dinner at a bar a couple times a month for what cable was charging you.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  Same here. And the best thing about it is how little time I spend watching crappy TV. What I do watch, I watch on purpose at the time I choose. And even buying TV shows to watch current seasons, I still only spend about 50% of what I used to spend on cable, including Netflix and Amazon subscriptions (and Amazon shouldn't really count since I don't buy it for the video access).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - dpark 11y ago
    I stopped my cable subscription a couple of years ago. I bought an antenna for live sports. I watch football, and my team is always broadcast on a local channel (I believe that it is always like that for NFL, because they know that they need to ensure their core fans can watch the game). I don't watch other sports much so I don't know how well this strategy would work.
    - douche 11y ago
      You can have local blackouts if they don't sell enough of the seats in the stadium. It doesn't happen a lot, unless you live in the Jacksonville market.
      - dpark 11y ago
        Wow, that sucks. I didn't realize that. Is that supposed to encourage people to go to the stadium? It seems like a good way to just drive away fans.
btrautsc 11y ago
There is a major logical error in this post. "Sports" is not about to pop. Anecdotally, I would assert sports (NFL, NBA, futbol/ soccer) seem to be growing more popular to every day people. What is potentially about to pop is the "entertainment" apparatus around Sports. Ie ESPN's programming the majority of hours per day that sporting contests are not airing. It feels like ESPN is going the way of MTV. I doubt that music is less popular than it was in the 90s, but the one of its strongest previous consumption channels was disrupted by dozens of access/ consumption points - and simultaneously instead of dedicating themselves to airing music videos, MTV began to divert a lot of their airwaves (and I would assume resources) to reality TV and non-music video content. ESPN (specifically) is in a similar position. On one hand, they appear to be working hard to offer streaming options - but they haven't gone all in on any type of consumption based or bulk access (to my knowledge)... Instead, they put "characters" like Mike&Mike or Stephen A Smith to put on shows that are related to sports. Unfortunately for ESPN there are too many content options (as well as competing sources for contract rights) for them to skate on thinly veiled sitcom characters and _very_ poor quality highlights in a world where we aren't locked in to 1 or 3 "channels" to access what is happening in the Sports world.
- gniv 11y ago
  The comparison with MTV is insightful. But what do you see as the equivalent of "dozens of access/consumption points" in sports? (I'm not following any organized sports)
  - binxbolling 11y ago
    Not sure about dozens, but: you can get push notifications to your phone about teams you follow; scores & updates available right within your fantasy sports app; highlights endlessly replayed on Vine etc; blogs and analysts on Twitter to provide insights without need for a bloviating ESPN pundit; endless ways to identify with your favorite teams, non-score updates & behind-the-scenes stuff via Facebook and Instagram; near real-time sports news on any number of sites.
  - btrautsc 11y ago
    Just thinking out loud, there are a few angles to it. #1 is that ESPN doesn't own the rights to air all sports (1), they have rights to certain events or leagues to air games on certain nights. For example, ESPN only airs 1 NFL football game per week, which is on Monday night. CBS, Fox, & NBC air games (which are subject to localized markets) on Sundays at various times. Another example, DirectTV (a satellite provider) offers a content package called NFL Sunday Ticket which gives subscribers the ability to stream any game live in any market (which is in many NFL fans opinion, the superior option). ... which brings another note to the parent topic - I would assert Sports (specifically the individual sport leagues) are effectively monopolies. The NBA is the professional basketball league in the USA. Its largely considered the best league in the world. It's product is very difficult to replicate. So those specific "properties" will continue to try to maximize their value as well as grow their audiences - and its not like you know Seinfeld is super popular so you can just write a new show and call it Friends. 2. When I was growing up, Sports highlights were ESPN's bread and butter. You couldn't watch every game the day or weekend before, so you watched ESPN that morning or night to see what happened and the spectacular plays. Well, now twitter or youtube or reddit are better sources of highlights than ESPN. They are on demand, close to real time, and (IMO) often higher quality. 3. Lastly, the "analysis" and ancillary Sports content that ESPN works hard at, is very competitive now. There are great podcasts and blogs for every sport and most teams. Those channels can be accessed almost anywhere - and they are often more "targeted" than what ESPN is offering. For example, I am a Memphis Grizzlies NBA fan. Let's equate that to I'm an Enterprise SaaS fan. Well, r/MemphisGrizzlies is kind of like Jason Lemkin's SaaStr - a site dedicated primarily to my specific niche. ESPN would be more like TechCrunch at large. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ESPN_sports_properties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ESPN_sports_properties
Rugoretto 11y ago
This is the same publication that "found" bitcoin's Satoshi a while ago. I'll hold off believing this until some other news organizations start reporting this. Meanwhile I'll be tuning in to watch the Golden State warriors tonight.
saturdaysaint 11y ago
I'm interested to see if sports' cultural cache experiences more of a perceptible fall. For a long time, sports fandom provided a uniquely immersive experience - a world of interesting play styles, strategies, stats, and exciting shared experiences in the big games. My sense is that the hardcore fans are still there, but a lot of casual followers are slowly being peeled away into other immersive experiences - well written TV, social media communities, deeper and deeper gameplay experiences. Additionally, gathering a bunch of people into a room to watch something isn't as much of a draw with the constant connectivity of smartphones. My girlfriend is a When you add the dinosaur economic model controlling the medium and the rising sensitivity to the brain damage that football causes, I wouldn't be too surprised to see a more perceptible downturn.
gz5 11y ago
The TV bubble has popped. For sports and all entertainment. But to use that evidence that all of "sports" is about to pop is a stretch. I suspect we will see much more direct interaction with teams & athletes, off-season live events, AR & gaming tie-ins, etc. We will move from passive, centralized TV consumption to more distributed, interactive interaction. Sports, as entertainment, is still very healthy, even if the mediums and peripherals are changing.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  To replace the loss of the current $30-$40 per month from casual fans would require hundreds per month from hard core fans. I don't think that's going to fly.
lordnacho 11y ago
One interesting comparison I didn't see in there was tube porn sites. You can get the highlights of pretty much any event with a simple search, so why pay to watch the whole thing? Sure, now and again a Champions League match could be good, but if people are like me, they'll mostly just have a look at the highlights. And I'm guessing there's a lot more marginal consumers than massive fans.
saiya-jin 11y ago
i might be a very odd ball, but i find it strange that in 21st century, people in the west pay relatively huge amounts for passively watching sports while sitting on the couch (to make picture complete, imagine some junk food lying just in front of them). popular sports became filthy moral dump where elite tries to outsmart doctors in doping tests, cares primarily about PR and chasing sponsors, and the sport itself sits somewhere out there, like a necessary, but not that important part if it all. honest, pure sportsman doesn't stand a chance in such a crowd. I choose not to support these "sports" anyway, ignore them and couldn't be happier. I focus on activities where athletes are doing it without massive cash incentives, because they love it. And since my sports include climbing, alpinism, ski touring etc. which at any point hold small risk of major injury or death, fear is semi-constant part of whole experience and overcoming your fear is necessary for any success at all... these sports discussed look very "meh" compared to it. Some real-people example - this Lebron James guy mentioned here today vs say Ueli Steck, or Alex Honnold.
- anoonmoose 11y ago
  This was posted on HN a while back: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/cultivated-disinterest-in-professional-sports https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/cultivated-disinterest-in-prof... I'm a nerd and I'm not big into the NBA (although I am into other sports) and I think if you can't figure out what is impressive about Lebron James then I think you're maybe not really trying to.
  - warfangle 11y ago
    On the other hand, no industry shields more rapists and abusers than major sports franchises.
    - douche 11y ago
      I'm almost certain that that is false. They may be high-profile, but there's only about 2000 players on NFL rosters, 500 on NBA rosters, 750 on MLB rosters, and another 750 on NHL rosters. In the grand scheme of things, that's not that many possible rapists and abusers, compared with the legions of, say, prison guards, or police officers, or lawyers, or soldiers, Catholic priests, or investment bankers.
panglott 11y ago
"When ESPN was adding subscribers, the $6.50 per-month-per-subscriber it charges to every cable operator meant $78 of additional annual profit for each new subscriber. This is a wonderful thing until a network starts losing customers, at which point all the revenue from every lost subscriber is chopped right out of that same network’s net profits." This sounds like a "collapse of complex societies" in which the Roman Empire can expand as long as there are increasing returns to complexification, but collapses when the yields of complexification plateau and there is instead declining marginal productivity. http://www.historytoday.com/christopher-chippindale/collapse-complex-societies http://www.historytoday.com/christopher-chippindale/collapse...
padobson 11y ago
Don’t buy ESPN’s PR talk that its 7 million-household dip in subscribers is just a blip. When ESPN was adding subscribers, the $6.50 per-month-per-subscriber it charges to every cable operator meant $78 of additional annual profit for each new subscriber. 7,000,000 * $78 = $546,000,000 Yeah, that's definitely not a blip. The reason this affects sports leagues is because a huge chunk of their revenue comes from TV. ESPN pays the NFL nearly $2B per year[1] just for Monday Night Football - or roughly 16 games a year. That's more than $100mm per game. It's becoming pretty clear that ESPN isn't going to be able to afford TV rights deals like that for much longer. Which means the NFL is going to have to find someone else (there is no one else) or reduce its prices. When the sports league revenue drops, collective bargaining agreements will be disrupted and the result will be labor unrest and (potentially) team bankruptcy. It's going to be entertaining to watch the entire industry implode before our eyes. When it's all over, we'll be able to enjoy sports as they should be - any game, streaming for a reasonable price, no blackout dates or other restrictions. It's a shame an entire industry has to collapse to get a good user experience. [1]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/sports/football/espn-extends-deal-with-nfl-for-15-billion.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/sports/football/espn-exten...
- Deregibus 11y ago
  > Which means the NFL is going to have to find someone else (there is no one else) Except NBC, CBS, FOX, Yahoo (hah), and the NFL itself via NFL Network, all of which already have contracts with the NFL which are worth more combined than ESPN's. For the NFL, having ESPN drop out would probably be a blip.
  - DeBraid 11y ago
    > For the NFL, having ESPN drop out would probably be a blip. Perhaps, but worth noting that when NHL ended their relationship with ESPN business suffered. While NFL is much larger, w/ greater and more diverse revenues, NHL suffered all sorts of unintended consequences, like reduced exposure when ESPN deprioritized hockey highlight packages.
    - 11y ago
hannob 11y ago
This is interesting in light of another trend: Just recently the citizens of Hamburg rejected having the Olympics in the city in a referendum. And they weren't the first, a number of cities have rejected major sports events when the people were asked. What's going on there is imho quite similar: By default it's expected that the costs of major sports events are largely payed by the public. But a large part of the population has no interest in that and asks why they should pay to make people rich that they don't care about. It seems the sports complex is in large partsdepend ing on income payed by people that don't care about it. It's only good if that's going to end. Sports events should be payed for by the people who like it, not by everyone else.
- leviathant 11y ago
  There was a time that I felt the same as you. As the years passed, my view shifted: Thank goodness for stadiums and sports franchises. Where would all those particular assholes (and I'm not saying all, or even the majority of sports fans are assholes) congregate if it weren't for sports bars and stadiums? The price we pay is definitely inflated, but I've come to appreciate the societal separation it provides.
- Rudism 11y ago
  The Olympics are particularly notorious for being a complete money sink. The host city builds all kinds of infrastructure to support them which become useless eyesores after the Olympics are done. You can find photos of abandoned and unused Olympic venues from as recent as the 2004 Athens and 2008 Beijing Olympics.
- tallanvor 11y ago
  The issues with the Olympics are a bit different. Cities and countries are looking at the costs and realize that, for the most part, there's no way for them to recoup the money they'd have to spend on the infrastructure. Plus, at least in Norway, people were really unhappy with the demands of the IOC - among other things, there were silly demands such as a cocktail reception with the king, and a bunch of other perks that don't sit well with people.
ricksplat 11y ago
Go Piggers!!!
vinceguidry 11y ago
This is why we can't have nice things. The argument for bundling is that it subsidizes production of the long tail of TV programming that would never exist if each production had to stand on its own feet. But cable providers can't be satisfied with the status quo. They want more and more money, so they are killing the golden goose. Americans were perfectly willing to pay $30-50 a month for cable. Industry greed has kicked that up to $70-80. It boggles my mind how utterly stupid they were to, not just negligently let this happen, but to work as hard as they can to force consumers to look for cheaper alternatives.
- wfo 11y ago
  The scenario is as follows: ESPN is the reason people buy cable. Without it cable is dead. Cable companies MUST have ESPN so ESPN has an enormous amount of leverage and use it to extract as much cash as possible. In this case cable providers are just the middlemen; either they say no to ESPN and lose all their subscribers, or raise the rates to untenable levels slowly and eventually lose all their subscribers while making a boat load of cash on the way. They unsurprisingly chose option B.
  - cjf4 11y ago
    Yeah, cable TV is ESPN and vice versa. Cable TV was basically invented by ESPN and ESPN will die (at least as it currently exists) with cable.
tgb29 11y ago
I think the NFL is still growing
overgard 11y ago
A couple of things that are misleading here: 1) Most of the high profile ESPN personalities departing had little to do with finances. Some of it was internal feuding (ie, the Bill Simmons departure), some of it was firing loose cannons for boorish statements that don't fly in our hyper-PC culture, and some of it was people leaving for more money from competitors. As others have noted, for a company the size of ESPN the salaries of a few high profile personalities are mostly negligible. 2) Same thing with the Grantland shutdown -- the site was never realistically expected to be a money maker, it was essentially shut down because the departure of Simmons made the site's future unclear, and ESPN decided to get out of the pop culture business and fold the sports writing back into their main site. 3) A lot of ESPN's cutbacks are because they (foolishly) forecast their finances on the assumption that subscriptions would continue to grow. That doesn't mean the well has dried up, it just means that they've been a bit reckless the past few years. 4) I think this is excluding that a lot of sports are consumed on the free broadcast stations (CBS, NBC, FOX, etc.). Even with cable folding, those networks are still going to be paying billions for TV rights. That said I agree with the overall gist of the argument that valuations are going to drop when the cable money starts drying out. I just don't think it's going to be a catastrophic crash or something; I doubt the average consumer will even notice.
webXL 11y ago
Man, I feel bad for all the people subsidizing my college football addiction over the years. Well, athletic departments' addiction to $$$ that is. But I never had to worry about not seeing a game live from my very own couch. It was very easy for me to justify $70/mo from September to January (until I found out I could get Sling for $25/mo). I never asked for 40 bowl games though. Hopefully all of those no-name bowls disappear. College sports was still exciting before they came along.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Hopefully not too far off topic: I really enjoy live sports but find sports on TV to be fairly boring. I have had more fun watching local high school teams play that watching 'big games' on TV. And, I really resent the 'ESPN tax' on cable bills, although now it is sometimes possible to unbundle that.
nogridbag 11y ago
I left this page open overnight on thedailybest.com and woke up in morning with "FirefoxPatch.exe" attempting to download (clean install of W10). Will not visit this site again.
jbiddy 11y ago
Much of that article didn't make sense, but there was a nugget of truth in there. Cable is losing subscribers, but that isn't a unique problem to ESPN. I don't think the sportstainment industry will see a bursting of the bubble, so to speak. I do think instead, people who consume sports and sportstainment will simply pay more to make up for the suckers that were pitching in without ever realizing it. There are sports fans out there that are cable-cutters, but not as many as you would think. Sooner or later, sooner if they have any sense, ESPN will move to the HBO Now type of model. That will bring many of them back.

153 points by gabbo 11y ago

Doubtful. ESPN is not synonomous with Sports. People may be becoming aware of the amount of their cable bill being sent to ESPN, but there are two problems blocking change. 1) They (the cable subscriber) can't do shit about it, they either accept the whole packege or not. 2) Why would the cable companies go for it anyway, I'm sure they know they can get more by forcing HGTV lovers to pay for ESPN, and ESPN lovers forced to pay for HGTV. Also, let's say this author is right, ESPN dies a slow death. How does that stop sports? ESPN doesn't have much (of the main sports) on it anyway. Sports games are on other networks. NFL - CBS,FOX. MLB - FOX,TBS. Soccer - NBC. NHL - NBC. I'm sure the sports that are on ESPN can find an home elsewhere. I'm not sure the dog shows are raking in huge TV money from ESPN that some PETS CHANNEL can't cover.

brianlweiner 11y ago
For baseball at least, the same points are valid for each area's RSN (regional sports network). MASN (Maryland / DC / VA area) gets something like $8-12 per subscriber. YES (NY Yankees network) I'm sure is able to charge even more. This has allowed MLB teams to spend a great deal of money in the past 5-10 years as teams have signed ever-more-lucrative television rights deals with FoxSports and others. If non-cable media packages are luring more and more cable subscribers (HBO, Hulu+, SlingTV, Netflix, etc) the pool of non-sports watching people subsidizing these networks shrinks - this will force either prices to rise for actual sports watching customers, or it'll lower revenues for teams. Rumor has it that MLB has been trying to push the RSNs to accept universal MLB.tv access for all regional markets, this at least makes the costs explicit - $100-140/season for each subscriber.
- Nelson69 11y ago
  There is more synergy there though. RSNs show more games with the team you like. It only makes sense to charge more and the fans are more than willing to typically pay it.
michaelbuckbee 11y ago
I think a summary might be that: 1. ESPN historically was making way more money than they should due to bundling. 2. ESPN is passing along a large percentage of this money to the sports teams in the form of media rights (aka they pay the NFL teams to show Monday Night Football). 3. ESPN is now on a downward path due to people opting out of bundles. 4. Sports teams will make less money overall after this shakes out as ESPN artificially bid up the market.
myNXTact 11y ago
It seems to me that the "death of ESPN" is more evidence of the death of the cable TV model than the death of sports.
- ssharp 11y ago
  This is probably true but I think ESPN is leading the pack because of how bloated they are. They run multiple channels 24/7 and a ton of their content is studio analysis-type shows, most of which I find absolutely terrible. I'm sure they have reasons for how they select and utilize the talent they have, but aside from a few writers and commentators, I have a hard time watching or reading anything they produce. I was hoping they'd eventually figure out a way to do more Grantland-produced television, where someone with some journalistic and creative taste, as well as more creative freedom could develop, but that obviously did not happen. Maybe Bill Simmons will be able to do that with HBO and finally create a legit competitor to ESPN's non-live sports programming.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    > I was hoping they'd eventually figure out a way to do more Grantland-produced television, where someone with some journalistic and creative taste, as well as more creative freedom could develop, but that obviously did not happen. Maybe Bill Simmons will be able to do that with HBO and finally create a legit competitor to ESPN's non-live sports programming. Their 30 for 30 films are awesome (thanks to Bill Simmons though, we'll see if it continues).
- VLM 11y ago
  The other death of sports issue was very carefully not mentioned in the article... look at the median age of baseball fans over the past decades. Its literally a dying sport, as in the fans are aging and dying and not being replaced. Obviously not an issue for some of the other sports. However being a sports nerd in the sitcom stereotype sense is definitely a boomer and pre-boomer generational thing, not so much with younger people, and old people have a way of dying off. The biggest mistake the article made was conflating sport related spending with the housing bubble. The housing bubble blew because the last entrants into the ponzi were tapped out. The cost of sports is microscopic in comparison and very few people give up cable because they're completely and utterly tapped out. They just spend the $100 on something else. Probably a smartphone and some subscription services. Certainly the last entrant into the ponzi of paying a billion bucks for a team on the assumption you'll sell to a greater fool at two billion has not been reached, nor has the very last new sports fan been born yet. The biggest oversight in articles of this type is no one wants to discuss bundling. The kind of business that forces all video subscribers to pay $30/mo for sports even if they're not sports fans, could, with just a couple clicks on a keyboard, change the bundle so all the cablemodem subscribers pay the same $30 extra for their cablemodem, but now it comes with free ESPN video or some kind of web access deal. There are, after all, only a handful of monopoly providers. So either pay $30 for ESPN, or disconnect yourself from the internet. Trying to avoid paying for sports is like trying to avoid paying for organized crime. Or disorganized crime, for that matter. Unfortunately you can either pay up, or leave the geography and culture entirely. The government and corporations certainly are not going to help us because they are the organized crime in this analogy.
bluedino 11y ago
I can get quality streams of any NFL game online without much searching. Almost all the sites have donation buttons. Sure, I'd pay the NFL $99 for the Sunday ticket package. Take DirecTV out of the picture. That's only a couple bucks per week.
osi 11y ago
My takeaway point was the nearly $40/mo each cable subscriber pays towards sports programming in aggregate. One of the reasons I cut the cord was the transparent fee Comcast had added (and hiked) related to Chicago-area local sports. As people that don't care about sports on TV ditch cable for streaming, that will just increase the budget pressure on all sports networks.
jonknee 11y ago
ESPN is certainly synonymous with sports. They also show a ton of sports, including the NFL (Monday Night Football) and MLB (multiple nights a week), NBA (multiple nights a week), NCAA basketball (almost every night), NCAA Football (every week and a ton of bowl games).
maxerickson 11y ago
There is presumably a level of demand for smaller bundles that would cause the cable companies to make changes. If there is, the change probably happens incredibly swiftly.
bradleyankrom 11y ago
Plus, most of the major sports leagues have developed their own cable networks (MLB Network, NFL Network, etc.).

spo81rty 11y ago

I never have understood why we pay for cable channels to then watch ads on them. They should be able to make some decent money just on the ads.

mikegioia 11y ago
Not only that, but have you ever counted the commercial minutes for an NFL game? I had to turn the game off mid-way through because I couldn't take it anymore. Something like 60-70% of the 3.5 hours are spent on commercials.
- dbot 11y ago
  Try NFL Redzone, that's a great experience. No commercials, just cutting from game to game and showing the action. I had it the past few years but didn't get it this year (due to frustrating bundling issues), and I agree that watching a single game is pretty terrible.
- drumdance 11y ago
  This is what Reddit is for. :-) The live game threads offer hilarious commentary on the commercials and announcers.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  NFL is just awful. From the commercials as you mention to making it all video game-like with the wooshes and whoops and graphics all over the screen. I just can't watch it. The commercials that are aired during sporting events make me feel like my IQ drops 30 points just watching them. No, can't do it. No NFL for me.
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    There's also the issue of CTE, which made me stop watching any football at any level.
drumdance 11y ago
Waaaaay back in the late seventies or early eighties, can't remember exactly when, I remember reading an article about how cable would get rid of commercials altogether and people would be able to vote via interactive TV for what show they wanted to watch. It only took 35 years but here we are.

spo81rty 11y ago

I also like the model of paying for the sports we want. I don't mind paying $50 a year to watch all MLS games and I can watch them on any device.

alistairSH 11y ago
Agreed. The only sport I watch with regularity is professional cycling. Aside from the Tour, there was little to no coverage on any cable network (in the US). So I cancelled cable TV, saved $100/month. Put some of that money into Netflix. And pay for streaming coverage of cycling events as-needed.

jmnicolas 11y ago

Here is my prediction for 2016 : the bubble of bubbles is about to pop !

ssharp 11y ago

The NBA just entered a massive television deal that kicks in next year. Since player's salaries are tied to the amount of revenue the league makes, a lot of players stand to make upwards of 50% more than they make now. It's a massive deal, so it's hard to swallow any impending doom. I just think viewership will continue adjusting where they get their content from. I haven't seen anything about changes to streaming in the new deal other than the contract leaves the issue open for negotiating a joint-partnership that could supersede previous limitations, which included teams in your local market, nationally televised games, and the playoffs. I absolutely love NBA basketball and although I don't watch a ton of it, it probably makes up for 90% of my television watching while it's in season. But I have to pay a cable bill upwards of $100 / month to do so. I really hope professional sports follows the decoupling model and offers higher-value streaming options in the future. The NFL's online offering is equally restricting, but local NFL games are generally broadcast over-the-air, so you can pick them up with an antenna, making cord-cutting easier.

harryh 11y ago
You should look into NBA League Pass. $200 for everything.
- ssharp 11y ago
  In the US, League Pass doesn't get you your local team, the national games, or any of the playoffs. I know outside of the US, they offer an international version that has it all and seems great, but they can't do that because of television deals in the US.
- fredleblanc 11y ago
  The current problem with all of these deals is blacked out games. I subscribe to the NHL GameCenter (same thing, different sport) and for the money you pay, the things you can't watch are ridiculous (it's worse than the NBA one). Only out of market games are allowed, no nationally televised games (always considered "in market," even if they're showing on obscure channels), and the NHL doesn't give you any of the post season. I follow an out of town team that's bad, so it works for me. It's the weird straddling of "old model" and "new model," and the big players trying to catch up while keeping contracts happy. Up until this year, for example, when I watched my team play on their home channel, I'd get all the commercials too. So, same as being in-state. Now I just get a message about a commercial break. The weird crux of it all is that you can watch many of the games if you want to wait 48 hours after the broadcast ends. However, in a world so connected, even not being on social media, even following a team 2,000 miles away from me, it's still hard to be purposefully oblivious to what's happening. I was sorta hoping the next round of contracts would leap the content divide and make streaming a first-class citizen along the rest (I don't mind watching commercials while streaming, I'd assume that would just make those spots even more lucrative.) But it looks like we're still a couple years away from that.

SixSigma 11y ago

In Other News Discovery expects Eurosport app to reach one million subs in two years Discovery Communications Chief Executive David Zaslav said he expects its Eurosport Group's player app to reach one million subscribers in two years and that it will bring an additional $100 million in revenue. "It's a big initiative," he said about the Eurosport app. Discovery took a controlling ownership position in the European sports broadcaster last year. The app currently counts about 200,000 subscribers. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-discovery-eurosport-idUSKBN0MR27S20150331 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-discovery-eurosport-idUSKB... Disclosure: I have been a subscriber since 2012, it costs about $5 a month. It is the only "tv" I watch. You get 2 regular sports channels. At the moment it is mostly Winter Sports: Alpine Skiing, Biathlon, Ski-jumping etc. With Snooker & Tennis. Summer is two wheeled action: Tour de France, World Superbikes plus World Touring Cars, Tennis, and a whole host of sports you can't get anywhere else. We even had minority sports like American Monday Night Football ;) http://www.eurosportplayer.co.uk/tvschedule-month.shtml http://www.eurosportplayer.co.uk/tvschedule-month.shtml

Practicality 11y ago
Sorry, Eurosport Player is not available in this country. :(

drpgq 11y ago

Canada is switching to a la carte pricing for cable channels soon. Personally I'm planning on keeping a fair number of the sports channels and ditching a lot of the cruft that has built up over the years on the typical Canadian bundle.

petercooper 11y ago

Here in the UK, sports channels are always an optional (and quite expensive) extra - it seems to work. Same with movie channels.

robk 11y ago
Yeah but in the UK consumers are used to public viewing in pubs. The USA has a far less developed sports bar market.
- osi 11y ago
  <insert generic comment about suburban living and drinking and driving> Sports bars are very alive and well in Chicago. Atypical for the US as a whole.
- mark-r 11y ago
  That's probably changing. The falling price of TVs means any bar that wants can have them wall-to-wall. It's getting hard to escape them.
ascagnel_ 11y ago
The same is true in the US. You have your "free" terrestrial service (BBC, Channel 4, et al. vs the "big four" of ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC funded by ads) that show a few sporting events on weekends, but for anything beyond that you'll need to have an expensive cable or satellite bundle. For example: the BBC shows some F1 races in their entirety and the rest are aired as highlight packages after-the-fact, while all races are shown on Sky Sports F1. In the US, NBC airs a select few races in their entirety (Monaco, Canada, and the US GP), while NBCSN shows the rest of the races live as well as tape-delay full-race repeats. NBC can be accessed over-the-air for free, but NBCSN is typically an add-on to a cable bundle, so you're paying $60+/mo to have access to that channel for (if you're only an F1 fan) at most 12 hours of content a month.
- petercooper 11y ago
  Yeah, but I have every satellite channel /except/ the sports and movie channels. It seems like ESPN gets bundled in as default with any extended package in the US. In the UK, sport is something you quite specifically have to sign up for - it doesn't get bundled with anything else because they assume not everyone is into sports.

brianwawok 11y ago

Sports is the main reason I don't have cable. Would I pay $20 for a few HGTV channels, and a few Discovery channels, and HBO? Sure. Would I pay $50 for the same + 20 sports channels? Nope, sports have 0 value to me. Not a huge loss though, netflix helps make up for missing content.

jonknee 11y ago
And you can get HBO without getting cable.
- jdmichal 11y ago
  Are you referring to HBO Now? Because no, I cannot just go online and order HBO Now because I am not a Verizon nor Optimum subscriber. http://help.hbonow.com/app/answers/detailHBO/a_id/172 http://help.hbonow.com/app/answers/detailHBO/a_id/172
  - jonknee 11y ago
    Umm, yea you can. You can buy it through the app, no Verizon/Optimim needed. They probably have some clause in their contracts with cable companies that they won't directly sell access, but you can go through Google/Amazon/Apple just fine. http://help.hbonow.com/app/answers/detailHBO/a_id/125/rec/1 http://help.hbonow.com/app/answers/detailHBO/a_id/125/rec/1 > HBO NOW is a stand-alone streaming service that you can purchase from a participating provider (not part of a cable subscription).
    - jdmichal 11y ago
      The subscriptions are handled through in-app purchases. I cannot load any of those apps onto my existing devices. So now I have to buy a device, so that I can subscribe to HBO Now? The point is that the blanket statement, "And you can get HBO without getting cable," is correct but not complete. You still must flow through a provider, and the providers are not universally available. A random person with an internet connection and a computer cannot order HBO Now.

skrowl 11y ago

I cut the cord 5 years ago now. I haven't looked back. Live sports is really the ONLY thing I miss, but you can go out to dinner at a bar a couple times a month for what cable was charging you.

merpnderp 11y ago
Same here. And the best thing about it is how little time I spend watching crappy TV. What I do watch, I watch on purpose at the time I choose. And even buying TV shows to watch current seasons, I still only spend about 50% of what I used to spend on cable, including Netflix and Amazon subscriptions (and Amazon shouldn't really count since I don't buy it for the video access).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- dpark 11y ago
  I stopped my cable subscription a couple of years ago. I bought an antenna for live sports. I watch football, and my team is always broadcast on a local channel (I believe that it is always like that for NFL, because they know that they need to ensure their core fans can watch the game). I don't watch other sports much so I don't know how well this strategy would work.
  - douche 11y ago
    You can have local blackouts if they don't sell enough of the seats in the stadium. It doesn't happen a lot, unless you live in the Jacksonville market.
    - dpark 11y ago
      Wow, that sucks. I didn't realize that. Is that supposed to encourage people to go to the stadium? It seems like a good way to just drive away fans.

btrautsc 11y ago

There is a major logical error in this post. "Sports" is not about to pop. Anecdotally, I would assert sports (NFL, NBA, futbol/ soccer) seem to be growing more popular to every day people. What is potentially about to pop is the "entertainment" apparatus around Sports. Ie ESPN's programming the majority of hours per day that sporting contests are not airing. It feels like ESPN is going the way of MTV. I doubt that music is less popular than it was in the 90s, but the one of its strongest previous consumption channels was disrupted by dozens of access/ consumption points - and simultaneously instead of dedicating themselves to airing music videos, MTV began to divert a lot of their airwaves (and I would assume resources) to reality TV and non-music video content. ESPN (specifically) is in a similar position. On one hand, they appear to be working hard to offer streaming options - but they haven't gone all in on any type of consumption based or bulk access (to my knowledge)... Instead, they put "characters" like Mike&Mike or Stephen A Smith to put on shows that are related to sports. Unfortunately for ESPN there are too many content options (as well as competing sources for contract rights) for them to skate on thinly veiled sitcom characters and _very_ poor quality highlights in a world where we aren't locked in to 1 or 3 "channels" to access what is happening in the Sports world.

gniv 11y ago
The comparison with MTV is insightful. But what do you see as the equivalent of "dozens of access/consumption points" in sports? (I'm not following any organized sports)
- binxbolling 11y ago
  Not sure about dozens, but: you can get push notifications to your phone about teams you follow; scores & updates available right within your fantasy sports app; highlights endlessly replayed on Vine etc; blogs and analysts on Twitter to provide insights without need for a bloviating ESPN pundit; endless ways to identify with your favorite teams, non-score updates & behind-the-scenes stuff via Facebook and Instagram; near real-time sports news on any number of sites.
- btrautsc 11y ago
  Just thinking out loud, there are a few angles to it. #1 is that ESPN doesn't own the rights to air all sports (1), they have rights to certain events or leagues to air games on certain nights. For example, ESPN only airs 1 NFL football game per week, which is on Monday night. CBS, Fox, & NBC air games (which are subject to localized markets) on Sundays at various times. Another example, DirectTV (a satellite provider) offers a content package called NFL Sunday Ticket which gives subscribers the ability to stream any game live in any market (which is in many NFL fans opinion, the superior option). ... which brings another note to the parent topic - I would assert Sports (specifically the individual sport leagues) are effectively monopolies. The NBA is the professional basketball league in the USA. Its largely considered the best league in the world. It's product is very difficult to replicate. So those specific "properties" will continue to try to maximize their value as well as grow their audiences - and its not like you know Seinfeld is super popular so you can just write a new show and call it Friends. 2. When I was growing up, Sports highlights were ESPN's bread and butter. You couldn't watch every game the day or weekend before, so you watched ESPN that morning or night to see what happened and the spectacular plays. Well, now twitter or youtube or reddit are better sources of highlights than ESPN. They are on demand, close to real time, and (IMO) often higher quality. 3. Lastly, the "analysis" and ancillary Sports content that ESPN works hard at, is very competitive now. There are great podcasts and blogs for every sport and most teams. Those channels can be accessed almost anywhere - and they are often more "targeted" than what ESPN is offering. For example, I am a Memphis Grizzlies NBA fan. Let's equate that to I'm an Enterprise SaaS fan. Well, r/MemphisGrizzlies is kind of like Jason Lemkin's SaaStr - a site dedicated primarily to my specific niche. ESPN would be more like TechCrunch at large. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ESPN_sports_properties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ESPN_sports_properties

Rugoretto 11y ago

This is the same publication that "found" bitcoin's Satoshi a while ago. I'll hold off believing this until some other news organizations start reporting this. Meanwhile I'll be tuning in to watch the Golden State warriors tonight.

saturdaysaint 11y ago

I'm interested to see if sports' cultural cache experiences more of a perceptible fall. For a long time, sports fandom provided a uniquely immersive experience - a world of interesting play styles, strategies, stats, and exciting shared experiences in the big games. My sense is that the hardcore fans are still there, but a lot of casual followers are slowly being peeled away into other immersive experiences - well written TV, social media communities, deeper and deeper gameplay experiences. Additionally, gathering a bunch of people into a room to watch something isn't as much of a draw with the constant connectivity of smartphones. My girlfriend is a When you add the dinosaur economic model controlling the medium and the rising sensitivity to the brain damage that football causes, I wouldn't be too surprised to see a more perceptible downturn.

gz5 11y ago

The TV bubble has popped. For sports and all entertainment. But to use that evidence that all of "sports" is about to pop is a stretch. I suspect we will see much more direct interaction with teams & athletes, off-season live events, AR & gaming tie-ins, etc. We will move from passive, centralized TV consumption to more distributed, interactive interaction. Sports, as entertainment, is still very healthy, even if the mediums and peripherals are changing.

bryanlarsen 11y ago
To replace the loss of the current $30-$40 per month from casual fans would require hundreds per month from hard core fans. I don't think that's going to fly.

lordnacho 11y ago

One interesting comparison I didn't see in there was tube porn sites. You can get the highlights of pretty much any event with a simple search, so why pay to watch the whole thing? Sure, now and again a Champions League match could be good, but if people are like me, they'll mostly just have a look at the highlights. And I'm guessing there's a lot more marginal consumers than massive fans.

saiya-jin 11y ago

i might be a very odd ball, but i find it strange that in 21st century, people in the west pay relatively huge amounts for passively watching sports while sitting on the couch (to make picture complete, imagine some junk food lying just in front of them). popular sports became filthy moral dump where elite tries to outsmart doctors in doping tests, cares primarily about PR and chasing sponsors, and the sport itself sits somewhere out there, like a necessary, but not that important part if it all. honest, pure sportsman doesn't stand a chance in such a crowd. I choose not to support these "sports" anyway, ignore them and couldn't be happier. I focus on activities where athletes are doing it without massive cash incentives, because they love it. And since my sports include climbing, alpinism, ski touring etc. which at any point hold small risk of major injury or death, fear is semi-constant part of whole experience and overcoming your fear is necessary for any success at all... these sports discussed look very "meh" compared to it. Some real-people example - this Lebron James guy mentioned here today vs say Ueli Steck, or Alex Honnold.

anoonmoose 11y ago
This was posted on HN a while back: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/cultivated-disinterest-in-professional-sports https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/cultivated-disinterest-in-prof... I'm a nerd and I'm not big into the NBA (although I am into other sports) and I think if you can't figure out what is impressive about Lebron James then I think you're maybe not really trying to.
- warfangle 11y ago
  On the other hand, no industry shields more rapists and abusers than major sports franchises.
  - douche 11y ago
    I'm almost certain that that is false. They may be high-profile, but there's only about 2000 players on NFL rosters, 500 on NBA rosters, 750 on MLB rosters, and another 750 on NHL rosters. In the grand scheme of things, that's not that many possible rapists and abusers, compared with the legions of, say, prison guards, or police officers, or lawyers, or soldiers, Catholic priests, or investment bankers.

panglott 11y ago

"When ESPN was adding subscribers, the $6.50 per-month-per-subscriber it charges to every cable operator meant $78 of additional annual profit for each new subscriber. This is a wonderful thing until a network starts losing customers, at which point all the revenue from every lost subscriber is chopped right out of that same network’s net profits." This sounds like a "collapse of complex societies" in which the Roman Empire can expand as long as there are increasing returns to complexification, but collapses when the yields of complexification plateau and there is instead declining marginal productivity. http://www.historytoday.com/christopher-chippindale/collapse-complex-societies http://www.historytoday.com/christopher-chippindale/collapse...

padobson 11y ago

Don’t buy ESPN’s PR talk that its 7 million-household dip in subscribers is just a blip. When ESPN was adding subscribers, the $6.50 per-month-per-subscriber it charges to every cable operator meant $78 of additional annual profit for each new subscriber. 7,000,000 * $78 = $546,000,000 Yeah, that's definitely not a blip. The reason this affects sports leagues is because a huge chunk of their revenue comes from TV. ESPN pays the NFL nearly $2B per year[1] just for Monday Night Football - or roughly 16 games a year. That's more than $100mm per game. It's becoming pretty clear that ESPN isn't going to be able to afford TV rights deals like that for much longer. Which means the NFL is going to have to find someone else (there is no one else) or reduce its prices. When the sports league revenue drops, collective bargaining agreements will be disrupted and the result will be labor unrest and (potentially) team bankruptcy. It's going to be entertaining to watch the entire industry implode before our eyes. When it's all over, we'll be able to enjoy sports as they should be - any game, streaming for a reasonable price, no blackout dates or other restrictions. It's a shame an entire industry has to collapse to get a good user experience. [1]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/sports/football/espn-extends-deal-with-nfl-for-15-billion.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/sports/football/espn-exten...

Deregibus 11y ago
> Which means the NFL is going to have to find someone else (there is no one else) Except NBC, CBS, FOX, Yahoo (hah), and the NFL itself via NFL Network, all of which already have contracts with the NFL which are worth more combined than ESPN's. For the NFL, having ESPN drop out would probably be a blip.
- DeBraid 11y ago
  > For the NFL, having ESPN drop out would probably be a blip. Perhaps, but worth noting that when NHL ended their relationship with ESPN business suffered. While NFL is much larger, w/ greater and more diverse revenues, NHL suffered all sorts of unintended consequences, like reduced exposure when ESPN deprioritized hockey highlight packages.
  - 11y ago

hannob 11y ago

This is interesting in light of another trend: Just recently the citizens of Hamburg rejected having the Olympics in the city in a referendum. And they weren't the first, a number of cities have rejected major sports events when the people were asked. What's going on there is imho quite similar: By default it's expected that the costs of major sports events are largely payed by the public. But a large part of the population has no interest in that and asks why they should pay to make people rich that they don't care about. It seems the sports complex is in large partsdepend ing on income payed by people that don't care about it. It's only good if that's going to end. Sports events should be payed for by the people who like it, not by everyone else.

leviathant 11y ago
There was a time that I felt the same as you. As the years passed, my view shifted: Thank goodness for stadiums and sports franchises. Where would all those particular assholes (and I'm not saying all, or even the majority of sports fans are assholes) congregate if it weren't for sports bars and stadiums? The price we pay is definitely inflated, but I've come to appreciate the societal separation it provides.
Rudism 11y ago
The Olympics are particularly notorious for being a complete money sink. The host city builds all kinds of infrastructure to support them which become useless eyesores after the Olympics are done. You can find photos of abandoned and unused Olympic venues from as recent as the 2004 Athens and 2008 Beijing Olympics.
tallanvor 11y ago
The issues with the Olympics are a bit different. Cities and countries are looking at the costs and realize that, for the most part, there's no way for them to recoup the money they'd have to spend on the infrastructure. Plus, at least in Norway, people were really unhappy with the demands of the IOC - among other things, there were silly demands such as a cocktail reception with the king, and a bunch of other perks that don't sit well with people.

ricksplat 11y ago

Go Piggers!!!

vinceguidry 11y ago

This is why we can't have nice things. The argument for bundling is that it subsidizes production of the long tail of TV programming that would never exist if each production had to stand on its own feet. But cable providers can't be satisfied with the status quo. They want more and more money, so they are killing the golden goose. Americans were perfectly willing to pay $30-50 a month for cable. Industry greed has kicked that up to $70-80. It boggles my mind how utterly stupid they were to, not just negligently let this happen, but to work as hard as they can to force consumers to look for cheaper alternatives.

wfo 11y ago
The scenario is as follows: ESPN is the reason people buy cable. Without it cable is dead. Cable companies MUST have ESPN so ESPN has an enormous amount of leverage and use it to extract as much cash as possible. In this case cable providers are just the middlemen; either they say no to ESPN and lose all their subscribers, or raise the rates to untenable levels slowly and eventually lose all their subscribers while making a boat load of cash on the way. They unsurprisingly chose option B.
- cjf4 11y ago
  Yeah, cable TV is ESPN and vice versa. Cable TV was basically invented by ESPN and ESPN will die (at least as it currently exists) with cable.

tgb29 11y ago

I think the NFL is still growing

overgard 11y ago

A couple of things that are misleading here: 1) Most of the high profile ESPN personalities departing had little to do with finances. Some of it was internal feuding (ie, the Bill Simmons departure), some of it was firing loose cannons for boorish statements that don't fly in our hyper-PC culture, and some of it was people leaving for more money from competitors. As others have noted, for a company the size of ESPN the salaries of a few high profile personalities are mostly negligible. 2) Same thing with the Grantland shutdown -- the site was never realistically expected to be a money maker, it was essentially shut down because the departure of Simmons made the site's future unclear, and ESPN decided to get out of the pop culture business and fold the sports writing back into their main site. 3) A lot of ESPN's cutbacks are because they (foolishly) forecast their finances on the assumption that subscriptions would continue to grow. That doesn't mean the well has dried up, it just means that they've been a bit reckless the past few years. 4) I think this is excluding that a lot of sports are consumed on the free broadcast stations (CBS, NBC, FOX, etc.). Even with cable folding, those networks are still going to be paying billions for TV rights. That said I agree with the overall gist of the argument that valuations are going to drop when the cable money starts drying out. I just don't think it's going to be a catastrophic crash or something; I doubt the average consumer will even notice.

webXL 11y ago

Man, I feel bad for all the people subsidizing my college football addiction over the years. Well, athletic departments' addiction to $$$ that is. But I never had to worry about not seeing a game live from my very own couch. It was very easy for me to justify $70/mo from September to January (until I found out I could get Sling for $25/mo). I never asked for 40 bowl games though. Hopefully all of those no-name bowls disappear. College sports was still exciting before they came along.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Hopefully not too far off topic: I really enjoy live sports but find sports on TV to be fairly boring. I have had more fun watching local high school teams play that watching 'big games' on TV. And, I really resent the 'ESPN tax' on cable bills, although now it is sometimes possible to unbundle that.

nogridbag 11y ago

I left this page open overnight on thedailybest.com and woke up in morning with "FirefoxPatch.exe" attempting to download (clean install of W10). Will not visit this site again.

jbiddy 11y ago

Much of that article didn't make sense, but there was a nugget of truth in there. Cable is losing subscribers, but that isn't a unique problem to ESPN. I don't think the sportstainment industry will see a bursting of the bubble, so to speak. I do think instead, people who consume sports and sportstainment will simply pay more to make up for the suckers that were pitching in without ever realizing it. There are sports fans out there that are cable-cutters, but not as many as you would think. Sooner or later, sooner if they have any sense, ESPN will move to the HBO Now type of model. That will bring many of them back.