26 ms·

ESPN Loses 621,000 Subscribers; Worst Month in Company History

330 points by kelukelugames 10y ago

spo81rty 10y ago
My complaints about the NFL is really the ridiculous length of the games and slow pace. The games are just boring. I've turned to be more of a soccer fan. In regards to sports revenues, I thinkit makes more sense for us as consumers to just subscribe directly to the leagues for the content. I signed up for MLS Live and can watch any game I want. Cut the cable stations out of it. Make the leagues create a product that people want to pay for.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  Why almost all of my NFL watching is via RedZone. (though I have it as a bolt-on to my corded service)
  - Touche 10y ago
    I find the popularity of RedZone to be bizarre; you're not watching football any more, you're watching a live version of sportscenter. If you don't find the games entertaining enough to watch, why do you want to follow the sport at all?
    - cjf4 10y ago
      If there's 8 games going on at once, and more than one of them turn out to be good, RedZone is awesome because you essentially get to watch all the good games at once while keeping tabs on everything else. It's definitely a different experience that immersing yourself in one game and loses some of that richness, but to say RedZone is just like Sportscenter indicates you're not really familiar with either.
      - Touche 10y ago
        I am, my brother-in-law loves RedZone and I've watched it with him several times. To me, it is as I described. I don't know how you can say that you "essentially get to watch all the good games" if you only get to see the scoring opportunities. You can't really get a feel for the game in 30 second clips here and there. Things that happened before the 20 yard line matter too.
        bdcravens 10y ago
        Maybe its what Sportcenter used to be. Today its filled with weird entertainment, clips from press conferences, ongoing stories, etc. I'd bet maybe 7 minutes of each 30 minute episode is actual daily sports highlights and scores (not to mention the commercials that aren't present on RedZone) I think that's why the comparison between RedZone and Sportcenter was considered less than apt.
    - bdcravens 10y ago
      When my team (Cowboys) plays, I'll generally watch the full game. I also watch some SNF/MNF/TNF games. But yes, it's fair to say I don't find every part of every game interesting (like commercials, cheesy halftime commentary, endless review of plays that will obviously be upheld/overturned in replay, 2 and 17 draw plays, etc) However, filtering out noise doesn't make me less of a sports fan, any more than reading headlines on HN makes me less of an industry enthusiast.
    - WildUtah 10y ago
      Red Zone is mostly for fantasy football players. It's far too shallow for actual fans. The deep, tense, complicated, sophisticated overtime tie game the Cardinals and Seahawks played last Sunday was among the very best games of the past year but would have had near zero profile on Red Zone.
      - Touche 10y ago
        That's a good point; fantasy and gambling are two areas where I could see RedZone as being valuable.
- hackuser 10y ago
  At least as of 1-2 years ago, NFL.com rebroadcasted games with everything but the plays themselves edited out. They took around 30 min. each, and were pretty watchable.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - hbosch 10y ago
    These types of game replays exist for both hockey and soccer. You lose context sometimes but for the most part the games remain cohesive and very exciting. Showing every pass, penalty, goal, turnover, and assist only couched by a few contextual seconds on either end of the clip gives you the full impression of the game without costing you an entire night... with the only setback being that you can't participate in the next day water cooler, if that's your thing.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      To be clear: The NFL broadcast I'm talking about shows every play, every moment of action. NFL games have 60 minutes of clock time; much of that time is spent between plays in huddles, etc. Thus 30 min can show you everything.
  - rconti 10y ago
    Yup, it's great. $100/year. Watch "full" games (minus halftime show and commercials, so it's only like 2h) and "condensed" games where they cut out the timeouts, replays, and time between plays (which can be a bit jarring, but watchable).. and only 35-45min per game.
- Touche 10y ago
  It's always boggled my mind how popular the NFL is given that you get 5 seconds of action followed by 30 seconds of sitting around waiting for the next 5 seconds. Especially since "slow pace" is used as an argument against baseball.
  - stinkytaco 10y ago
    It's a sport tailor made for TV. Watch the action, then rewatch it from a variety of angles and with analysis. The stopping is actually good for the game, since TV allows you to revisit the play over and over again. If that's not your thing, I get it, but if it is, they keep you plenty engaged.
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    You're supposed to watch the games with family and friends and share conversation and snacks during the game. The pauses in the action are there to give you time to spend with each other without letting any conversation get deep, meaningful, and awkward.
hossbeast 10y ago
So does this reflect a waning interest in sports, or are these subscribers going elsewhere?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It's people moving away from paying for cable, probably people that don't have much interest in sports but were paying for ESPN as part of the default bundle of channels. I suspect a large portion of them never watched ESPN to begin with.
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  Pretty sure it's both. I think that esports are kind of displacing traditional sports for 'millennials'.
  - Zelphyr 10y ago
    I've read that this is also true in the sense that many young players are opting out of physical sports. Coaches are complaining that the kids don't want to play a game they can't reset when it's not going well for them. The coaches, of course, see this as a bad thing but I don't think it's necessarily good or bad. It's just the reality that there are now more options for people.
    - Matachines 10y ago
      > Coaches are complaining that the kids don't want to play a game they can't reset when it's not going well for them. How is this not a bad thing? I certainly wouldn't want my son or daughter give up as soon as things don't work out. That kind of behavior spills into the rest of life, not just sports.
    - tdkl 10y ago
      Seems like a result of the babysitting in modern gaming. Also there's a lack of learning that loss and bad feelings aren't icky and there's nothing wrong with someone who feels that instead prescribing them medication. The changes in schools and helicopter parenting are these causes.
raverbashing 10y ago
This is good news Entrenched business need to suffer pain to move. In this case, not ESPN necessarily, but NFL and other content providers
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It's gonna hit player salaries pretty hard. ~1/2 of revenue goes to players. http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/11200179/nfl-teams-divided-6-billion-revenue-according-green-bay-packers-financials http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/11200179/nfl-teams-divide... $171 million of player costs against $324 million in revenues.
  - seibelj 10y ago
    When you are a football player, and this is what you have been training and dreaming of your entire life, making $15mil instead of $30m, or maybe $1m instead of $2m on the low end, would not make you stop playing football and start selling insurance or whatever.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      I was simply commenting about where the money goes. Players capture a lot of the revenue, a decline in revenue will thus likely be reflected in a decline in their compensation. To your point, they can go down quite a lot and still be viable.
      - 36bydesign 10y ago
        Well that's tragic /s
      - seibelj 10y ago
        Gotcha, I was just saying how I doubt it will result in worse player quality, at least not immediately.
        10y ago
pjc50 10y ago
Cord-cutting?
- tzakrajs 10y ago
  Netflix popularized the phrase in an attempt to create a movement of people who turn of their cable tv service (cut the cord) and switch to Netflix.
  - Retra 10y ago
    That doesn't sound accurate.
    - tzakrajs 10y ago
      It is, but they have taken steps to distance themselves from that marketing bc of their strategy for MPVD.
wheaties 10y ago
The lack of NFL on Netflix and Amazon Prime is the only thing that makes me reconsider cable. I haven't but it hurts. Sports bars just don't cut it.
- fingerprinter 10y ago
  NFL gamepass does the trick most of the time. Includes RedZone as well. Sometimes a game is blacked out which requires a VPN to see any specific game, but RedZone and NFL Live are always good, as far as I've seen. https://gamepass.nfl.com/nflgp/secure/schedule https://gamepass.nfl.com/nflgp/secure/schedule
  - streamingthings 10y ago
    There's also sites like http://hehestreams.xyz http://hehestreams.xyz that offer this — at an even higher quality — so you don't have to use a VPN. Reborn4HDLife is also in the category.
  - jonknee 10y ago
    In the US game pass shows no live games which makes it much less interesting for almost all fans. It's targeted at hard core fans who want to watch replay games or many games each week.
  - jrnichols 10y ago
    The NFL is one organization that really needs to give up on the media blackout nonsense, and get on the streaming game. the US version of GamePass doesn't cut it. Consumers really do want live games, not restrictions saying that they can't watch anything until everything for the day has aired. They don't want wireless carrier exclusives, or expensive satellite add-ons. The NFL needs to learn from MLB. The MBL.tv app on the Apple TV is fantastic.
    - jonathankoren 10y ago
      how is MLB.tv different from Extra Innings? EI suffers from blackout bullshit.
draw_down 10y ago
If fewer and fewer people are watching football each year, I'm unclear what NFL's argument will be for charging more for the rights, or even the same amount.
- a3n 10y ago
  Maybe they just want to suck ESPN dry before they bother going to the next phase.
protomyth 10y ago
It just impacts ESPN the most because ESPN costs every cable and satellite subscriber roughly $7 a month, over triple the next most expensive cable channel. Yep, if you have a cable or satellite subscription, whether you watch ESPN or not, you're paying ESPN over $80 a year. At some point, the decline will be enough to kill these deals.
- byuu 10y ago
  > Yep, if you have a cable or satellite subscription, whether you watch ESPN or not, you're paying ESPN over $80 a year. And that right there is one of the main reasons why I don't have a cable or satellite subscription anymore. Very tired of subsidizing channels I never watched. Most especially ESPN. That and the trend of, "oh you want AMC? Well you'd better buy the super premium $140 a month 200+ channel package! You can't get it with just the $80 a month 120 channel package." And, of course, the ads. My money or advertisements: pick one.
  - hxegon 10y ago
    The amount of ads on television is mind boggling. If I want to watch a 30 minute show, I don't want it to be an hour long event filled with ads for prescription medication when I already pay money to watch the show.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Why don't you get a DVR? I just start watching it a bit later and skip the ads.
  - rjvir 10y ago
    Bundles are often great deals for consumers. The TV bundle is the result of decades of scale, iteration, and the free market. TV has a lot of weaknesses, but I don't think its bundle economics are one of them. The most successful alternatives to TV are also bundles, and the bundling is a critical part of their success. Imagine instead of paying $10/month for Netflix, you had to pay for each show a la carte (like iTunes). That would be worse for consumers - and creators.
bogomipz 10y ago
Sorry I'm a bit cable-consumer illiterate, can someone explain is ESPN a separate premium channel these days on cable? It used to be I believe included in the offering just above "basic cable." Is this no longer the case? I am guessing you subscribe to just ESPN now? Otherwise there would be no way to get exact subscriber loss numbers correct?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It's still a packaged channel. The article links the source of the information, Nielsen’s estimates the subscriber counts for a variety of channels.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I think his point is that, if it were universally part of basic cable packages (which AFAIK, it used to be), it shouldn't drop more than basic cable subscribers overall. So I suspect, though don't know, that because of its increased cost to cable operators, it may be in a higher tier package on some systems that many people are not taking.
carsongross 10y ago
Cord cutting is a big part of this, but there is a cultural aspect in play as well: ESPN has been increasingly pushing a progressive narrative on its viewers, many, perhaps most, of whom are conservatives. The NFL is seeing the same thing, with big declines in viewership since the national anthem protests began. I see a lot of newly developed/developing antipathy towards professional sports among my right-wing acquaintances. What's funny is that the reasoning is often very similar to what my left-wing acquaintances had to say back when I was at Berkeley. As with the libertarian -> alt-right shift of the last five years, I think it is one of the more interesting sociological developments I am aware of, and largely unremarked upon by the press.
- rjvir 10y ago
  They are learning the hard way the drawbacks of being uncompromising in the belief of antiracism.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  >"ESPN has been increasingly pushing a progressive narrative on its viewers, ..." Can you explain what this narrative is?
  - carsongross 10y ago
    An example: http://www.espn.com/espys/2015/story/_/id/13264599/caitlyn-jenner-accepts-arthur-ashe-courage-award-espys-ashe2015 http://www.espn.com/espys/2015/story/_/id/13264599/caitlyn-j...
  - tzakrajs 10y ago
    Players refusing to kneel for National Anthem out of protest for police violence and injustice towards minorities.
    - deleted 10y ago
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    - bluejekyll 10y ago
protomyth 10y ago
I figure that the NFL and NBA will eventually be the only broadcast outlet for their games. MLB has a bit of a different setup (local team contract with local provider and then national contract), but I would bet the national contract will go away. The MLB is already doing well with the national contract getting in the way of a great viewing experience[1]. Apple is probably right that the future of TV is apps. I would expect college conferences / NCAA to unite and do the the TV as some point. I see ESPN (or their replacement) as basically Netflix for sports that cannot build an infrastructure that allows for subscriptions. Although, the MLB has done service for others and might just do it for other sports. I would say some of the value of the commentary on ABC / ESPN is diminished by their talk of politics. It has become something of a joke about what Bob Costas will lecture us on this week. People go to sports to escape and be with friends, and not be lectured to. Looking at the feeds I follow this is a bit of the loss of people. 1) I do love them having multiple separate streams per game (Home Audio, Away Audio, Home Video, Away Video plus alternate language for some things). The bitching my parents do when the game is on ESPN or Fox is pretty heavy because of the degraded viewing experience and inconvenience of it. Plus when they aren't showing the game and my dad has to revert to internet radio generates some commentary.
- jonknee 10y ago
  > I would say some of the value of the commentary on ABC / ESPN is diminished by their talk of politics. It has become something of a joke about what Bob Costas will lecture us on this week. People go to sports to escape and be with friends, and not be lectured to. Looking at the feeds I follow this is a bit of the loss of people. Bob Costas works for NBC and is never on ABC or ESPN...
  - protomyth 10y ago
    He does NBC for the Olympics (edit: got that wrong he does the other football games on NBC) oops, I suppose I can just point to some of the other commentators.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
jknoepfler 10y ago
so ESPN: 1. consumes monopoly priced content (ESPN pays $1.9 billion/year for "Monday Night Football") with waning appeal. 2. produces content only to obsolete content providers (cable/satellite t.v. providers), appears contractually bound to remain this way. 3. (imo) has a dubious content model in the 21st century. The ESPN content I've seen has been standard corporate-cable lowest common denominator garbage that builds no trust with the audience. I'd be surprised they weren't dying more quickly, but it has taken me years at a time to get my older relatives to cancel cable subscription they never use (not just sort of never, literally never).
- marrone12 10y ago
  ESPN is unfortunately bound contractually that they have to delivery their content through cable providers. I remember reading that if they developed their own direct-to-consumer product, they could no longer be on any cable channels. That's why they've partnered with Sling TV and Sony Vue, whose numbers are not included in the 650k loss. I'm sure those services each have a couple hundred thousand subscribers, and anecdotally, many of my cord-cutting / sports fan friends get their ESPN fix through those instead of a huge cable bundle.
  - Retra 10y ago
    I feel like they'd have enough leverage to get out of that arrangement, considering the large number of people who only subscribe to cable for the sports packages. It's not like cable providers are going to say "Oh, you put your stuff online, well, we're just going to stop offering sports then", as they'd just plain lose customers by responding like that. At least, that's my naive impression.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  >3. (imo) has a dubious content model in the 21st century. The ESPN content I've seen has been standard corporate-cable lowest common denominator garbage that builds no trust with the audience. I think ESPN Films (producer of 30 for 30) as well as properties like the now defunct Grantland or FiveThirtyEight show that ESPN is trying to expand its reach beyond a cable only model. But you can't just dump your big revenue stream overnight. To some extent they are weighed down by their past and can't shed it fast enough.
IBM 10y ago
Sports is the thing that holds the cable bundle together. If that gives, the whole thing will fall apart. Right now the economics for content owners favors bundling (example: Disney forces cable companies to take a bunch of other channels with ESPN). In this really good report [1] about Apple's TV efforts (with obvious entertainment industry sources) they had this line: >Mr. Cue has said the TV industry overly complicated talks. “Time is on my side,” he has told some media executives. Eddy Cue is absolutely right. [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-hard-charging-tactics-hurt-tv-expansion-1469721330 http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-hard-charging-tactics-hur...
chiefalchemist 10y ago
That popping sound you hear is the sports bubble bursting. That said, best I can tell, ESPN is heavily weighted with traditional sports. For example, there's very little support of soccer. In shot, ESPN is like the GOP. That is dated and failing fast.
- deleted 10y ago
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- EpicEng 10y ago
  You guys live in such a tiny bubble. Soccer is gaining popularity, yes. That's great, but the NFL brought in 11.6B last year. The MLS? 533M. Hell, Hockey brought in seven times that. The NFL is the largest professional sports league on the planet. Soccer is still very niche here and most people watching ESPN simply don't give a crap about it (myself included.) ESPN is failing because their commentary is going downhill and they're trying to become a pop culture entertainment channel. More soccer would just hurt them.
  - petepete 10y ago
    > The NFL is the largest professional sports league on the planet. True, but only just. By media income, the Premier League is projected to surpass the NFL in 2017.
    - EpicEng 10y ago
      Premier league is not American sports. ESPN caters to an American audience, which is exactly what we're talking about here. How is that relevant? Few people here care about European sports. And why cherry pick media income? Premier league made 4B. The NFL is projected to bring in 13B this year.
  - j1vms 10y ago
    Association football (as in football or soccer, depending on where you are), through its various leagues, has much higher combined revenues than the NFL. In fact, the European leagues alone have greater aggregate revenue than the NFL. The NFL is of course one tightly-coupled organization, so comparison might not be "fair game". And yeah the MLS is even quite small compared to several of its counterparts throughout the world. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_leagues_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_le...
MicroBerto 10y ago
This isn't complicated. Just notice how all of the "neo-liberal" channels, magazines, newspapers, and other publications are getting PUMMELED. I want to read (and hear) about SPORTS, not get bombarded with human interest pieces or have Colin Kaepernick and European soccer shoved down my throat. And I'm clearly not alone.
- selimthegrim 10y ago
  I don't think that word means what you think it means
  - todd8 10y ago
    Just to second this observation, see "neoliberal" in the Wikipedia. Nevertheless, I understand the parent comment's point (just replace "neo-liberal" with "left-leaning").
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  :) 'Liberal' - in every country in the world except the USA (and Canada) means 'Classical Liberalism' which 'economic liberalism' or 'everything not run by the Monarchy'. This is we call the Judiciary and Legislative 'Liberal institutions'. Economic liberals are kind of the old Bourgeoisie. The 'Liberal' parties of the world are more like 'Libertarian' parties of the US, but they tend to be more 'business' like, and not so much 'anti government' and the don't have this 'don't tread on me' colloquial/aggressive attitude. They tend to be somewhat left-leaning on social issues. 'Neoliberal' is a term to describe those who are 'super free market' proponents, i.e. Chicago school of economics - free trade everywhere, no government 'interference'. etc.. I think what you mean is 'left-leaning' or 'socially leftist dogmatically'. Also - European Football is not 'left leaning' - it's also what the rest of the world plays, and so do a lot of Americans. I've read some polls indicating that the vast majority of Americans are upset with Kapernick, and the corporate tone of ESPN is getting fairly PC these days, which can be a good or bad thing depending on ... personally, I think sports is kind of an arena where people want to escape political issues and just play sports. ESPN has made some PC decisions lately and I wonder if this has been a factor myself.
dcosson 10y ago
One thing about NFL rights that I haven't really seen discussed is they're so regional, and that doesn't seem to make much sense anymore, at least in big cities. Having lived in NY and SF everyone I know who's into football has a different favorite team, since they grew up in a different place. But the broadcast networks can all only show regional games in each area. There's no way to subscribe to all games from 1 team because the networks all get exclusive rights to different games. In the US there's not even a good way to subscribe to all games on a single service other than I think direct tv which is a pain in the ass and doesn't work for apartment buildings. This doesn't solve ESPN's problem, but for the NFL offering these two services on demand at different price points seems like such an obvious way to boost viewership.
- djrogers 10y ago
  The NFL Season Ticket package has been decoupled from DirecTV for a couple of years now - you can watch your non-local games on pretty much any streaming device.
  - dcosson 10y ago
    I think that's Sunday Ticket, and it's only sunday day games? So if your team is playing Monday night, you'll still need an ESPN subscription, Sunday night you need cable or an antenna that gets NBC, Thursday night you need twitter or cable or an antenna. I think even Sunday day games in your local area you might not get, so you need basic cable/antenna for that. And not sure if you can watch many of these with a delay/on-demand. Why can't there be one service that I can just pay for and turn on at any time after it airs, like HBO Now?
  - kodablah 10y ago
    I have a streaming device called "uverse", some have fios, some cable, some dish network, etc. Why can't these devices show it?
  - infosample 10y ago
    > The NFL Season Ticket package has been decoupled from DirecTV If you can prove you can't get DirecTV at your residence. Otherwise you have to get NFL Game Pass and watch the game replay later (usually the next day), not live. http://www.nfl.com/watch-nfl-live http://www.nfl.com/watch-nfl-live
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Call me crazy, but I have an idea and it's been kicking around in my head for a while. But, how about a wireless broadcast system for video. I hear you laughing, but wait. Give me a second. Have large broadcast towers that broadcast out digital (ok, analog signals that are carriers for digital output) signals that can be picked up by antennas in the home. Sounds crazy, right? It could broadcast sports, news, entertainment, you name it. You could even finance it with product placements (strategically placed in the videos) or just short ads (I like to call them commercials, but I am not sure why). You all are pretty smart, does this sound like it has any way at all of succeeding? Talk about cord cutting!
- solipsism 10y ago
  Seems like you're trying to make some point. No idea what it could be though.
- projektir 10y ago
  So, over the air?
- LAMike 10y ago
  Sounds possible, the question is will this be like a pirate radio for video? Or are you trying to legally license content and broadcast it locally. Hopefully I'm not replying to a parody post
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    You are replying to a parody post. He's describing broadcast television.
- kodablah 10y ago
  Hrmm, what shall our company do to all of those people that can't get high quality over the air or just want better quality along with cable/satellite? We should have our channels appear digitally in high quality on the boxes they are already paying for! Sounds crazy, right? Oh, and then we can use our leverage (i.e. these viewers) and our congressional lobbyist to allow us to charge them to carry our content when not over the air! We'll call it "retransmission fees". Sure, maybe there's a side effect where our reliance on retransmission fees is higher than advertising, but who cares...we can have both! You all are pretty smart...these exclusive deals that we make for content that we make hard to obtain not-over-the-air will make big money.
Animats 10y ago
Major League Baseball's World Series is in progress. This didn't show up prominently on major news sources. It's three screens down even on the New York Daily News front page, after an article about former nightclubs of NYC. Unless you're looking for baseball news, it's invisible online. Median age of baseball fans is 53 years and climbing. When the median age of horse racing fans passed 50 years, racetracks started closing. Baseball as a big commercial sport probably has about a decade to live.
- thinkingkong 10y ago
  Link to some supporting evidence?
  - infosample 10y ago
    Median viewer by age in 2014 - MLB 53 and trending older / NFL 47 and trending older / NBA 37 and remaining steady. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/06/what-the-nba-gets-that-the-other-big-sports-leagues-dont/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/06/what-...
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  Not quite. Baseball is not 'hot' but that does not mean it doesn't have a solid fanbase. The median age of 'human beings' in America is climbing :) Here's one example: home teams getting amazing ratings: http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2016/07/19/with-2016-season-half-over-tv-ratings-for-mlb-shows-rsns-ruling-in-prime-time/#2fe2299e46a2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2016/07/19/with-2016-... You'd be surprised at how some of these sports have huge fab-bases without the Kardashian media noise. Media is changing just as much as anything, and this is a key factor. NYPost/NYT have to keep up to Buzzfeed. ESPN has to keep up with Netflix/online viewership. Sports will have a harder time because the contracts are locked up and hard to access - whereas an upstart in Film/TV can come along and disrupt.
  - deleted 10y ago
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brentm 10y ago
One thing is clear to me and that is there will be many wounded companies in the battle for attention. Pro sports and the ancillary industries surrounding it are not immune. Twenty years from now I believe we will look back at this period as peak pro sports.
legodt 10y ago
I'm sorry that anti-racism makes you cringe.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  I don't think that's a fair comment. Sometimes you just want sports, and it's fair to compartmentalize concerns.
- pmorici 10y ago
  Seems like if they left it at that it would be fine but by commenting on a political candidate they take it from a basic human respect and understanding story to a divisive political story.
- golemotron 10y ago
  It's not the anti-racism, it's the incessant lecturing. As an example, if Trump wins in a few weeks it won't be because half the country are racists it will be because they are tired of being lectured to as if they were.
  - edmccard 10y ago
    >It's not the anti-racism, it's the incessant lecturing. Get it? Since when is "linking to another site" some kind of "incessant lecturing"? If you don't want to read stories on theundefeated.com, don't click the links.
    - CptJamesCook 10y ago
      "I find this type of messaging across all of ESPNs platforms these days." Also, if espn owned and linked to a pro-Nazi or KKK site, I'm sure you'd quickly see my point.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > incessant It's an incessant, continuing problem. There is widespread, serious harm done by racism, in almost every aspect of American life (ignoring other countries for the moment). Therefore, it will be discussed frequently. It's very unbalanced to say the problem isn't all these people suffering, but that you are tired of talking about it. I'm tired of talking about Aleppo, but my tiredness isn't really an issue on the scale of things. > it won't be because half the country are racists There is a lot of racism in the U.S. In your model, who is responsible for it? How is it happening?
heisenbit 10y ago
Editing, bundling and distribution adds value. But only so much value. Information flows these days more freely and on-demand. Quasi synchronous distribution of news has moved to social media. Like newspapers and telco's already cable companies are struggling to demonstrate they are adding value. It did not matter so much in the past but now more importantly they are loosing the eyeballs gatekeeper (and thus pricing power) position. Sports funding is heading towards a brick wall unless it finds other revenue streams. Which is in part possible as they have unique advertisement bearers. But as the bundling is not as big the pricing power of individual athletes and teams probably will be less as an aggregate.
Phlow 10y ago
I would pay ESPN $10 a month for an ESPN streaming app that had access to all the college football games (no blackouts), alone, as long as it didn't require a cable subscription. The current ESPN streaming app is garbage, compared to Netflix, and other on-demand interfaces. It's not available on my Smart TV. The quality of the streaming is terrible. It's slow to bring up video. The ads are repetitive and annoying, and it's a second class citizen with wait screens while local ads are up on broadcast. Comcast recently decided to institute a 1TB/month cap in my area, with a charge of $10 per 50GB after up to $200, or $50 for unlimited (opt-in, by the sounds). There are no technical reasons why they did this, it was entirely to gain more revenue to make up for the cord cutters. Their own streaming service doesn't apply to their data cap. The whole thing is garbage and needs to be completely changed. The moment Google Fiber or something better comes along in my area, I'm going internet only, and I'll just go without until they realize how badly they've managed to move with the trends and start fixing it.
- mbloom1915 10y ago
  I think you nailed it here - cord cutting is part of it (I've done it myself) but ESPN is failing to deliver internet content effectively. The 'watchespn' site/app is clunky, slow, and sometimes takes multiple provider logins to work. When you see how simple it is to watch the NFL on Twitter vs. the 5 step broke process of ESPN online - the choice is clear. It's too bad they won't upgrade basic site functions since they cover the most sports globally, including games with expected low viewership...YouTube has been an easier outlet for some to broadcast live.
  - johndubchak 10y ago
    Well, at least now they have the perfect marketing spin, "We no longer have the subscriber base to support cost effective investment in this market segment. We'll need to increase our subscriber rates significantly in order to offset any investment in a new streaming platform." In short, consumers, once again, get screwed for the shoddy investments in technology by the behemoths.
    - 10y ago
ChuckMcM 10y ago
My wife and I "cut the cord" as it were this year, now with OTA TV and a Netflix and Amazon prime account. OTA reliably gets you local and national news, Netflix and Amazon between them reliably get you movies and recent television shows. And of course with Amazon you can rent/buy stuff. What you don't get are sports. You find that more and more those sports have become the single reason you might want to buy a cable/satellite subscription. I welcome their final capitulation to the point where I can subscribe to just my teams and not suffer blackout rules in my home market.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  Yeah. It's only sports. This year the only things I can remember watching at the time it aired were (in order of appearance): Super Bowl NBA Finals Presidential debates World Series The only other thing I can expect is election returns. I really like the world of on demand programming. It's much more convenient, and I'd like on demand sports, but only if it's from the same day. I just can't get into watching yesterday's game. Maybe if I could watch today's game time shifted...
  - _asummers 10y ago
    The live streaming packages offered by the various sports organizations are generally pretty good if you're out of market, but are still subject to national blackouts. NHL for example plays a LOT of games on NBCSN, which is only available via cable packages. I'm able to follow all the Philadelphia teams I care about in Chicago without many issues, but having blackouts in 2016 is absurd.
- admyral 10y ago
  My better half primarily watches E! (Keeping up with the Kardashians), HGTV, Food Network, etc. All have full episodes online, but require the cable subscription login dance. Even if I could get the live sports I wanted, I don't foresee these "middle America" networks and shows embracing cord cutting anytime soon.
  - zaphar 10y ago
cdevs 10y ago
PlayStation vue is my new cable, month to month suckas
- kodablah 10y ago
  Lots of cable subscriptions are sans contract. PSVue could actually be considered part of the problem: they pay what is asked by these broadcasters and they toe the line with their requirements of how you can consume the content.
mbloom1915 10y ago
ESPN overpayed for rights fees years ago not expecting viewership to decline at all - nevermind so rapidly. I'm sure even at those high prices they make a boatload off ad revenue but clearly their poor content and lack of focus on a live internet outlet for games is killing them. Also, all their good employees left!! FoxSports has most of them..
fbreduc 10y ago
i blame these sports orgs, tyrants of content down to the minute details...like dang, give alittle to get a lot
mbloom1915 10y ago
The WORST part of all of this is how Disney owns a great video streaming company who built our a killer product for the MLB, and they can't apply it to the ESPN ecosystem, whose video player is TRASH.
flylib 10y ago
what's overlooked is this is bad for consumers who are sports fans, if Fox/CBS/ESPN/NBC cut back spending for sports rights and get less games, you will be at the mercy of the sports leagues online services to watch content who will have all the pricing power and will force you into season passes, this is naive to think it will just affect ESPN and not the other networks, content will be getting significantly more expensive in the future across sports/television shows
- isuraed 10y ago
  They won't have all the pricing power because sports will be competing with each other for viewership.
LAMike 10y ago
Prediction: Disney will buy Netflix and in 2021 buy the rights to the next 10 years of the NFL for 20 Billion, and raise the price of netflix to $25/month.
douche 10y ago
Their programming has been getting progressively more terrible over the last few years. I used to watch SportsCenter religiously, but I just can't stand the idiocy, the blatant shilling for the leagues, the political advocacy, and the puff pieces anymore. I watched it for game recaps, scores, and highlights, and just as MTV doesn't show music videos anymore, ESPN doesn't really serve that niche anymore. I'm not tuning in to watch Skip Bayless and Stephen A Smith yell incoherently at each others, or suspected-murderer-cum-saint Ray Lewis blather. The one really great source of content they had going, Grantland, and by extension, 30 for 30, they loused up because of internal political games.
lordnacho 10y ago
The question is whether there's anything really unusual going on here. It's quite normal for a business, especially one not owned by a family, to just keep growing and growing until it pops or levels out. The NFL as well as the Premier League are seeing a dip in interest, after a long period of expansion. The story of sports in the last couple of decades has been for more and more money to be poured in, more and more content to be produced. Well obviously at some point there won't be anybody left to sell to. Same goes with smartphones, cars, and everything else that you can think of. Now as for this particular market, what might have changed? Well perhaps the way we watch sports has changed a lot recently. You can basically pull live streams or highlights from any major sports event for free. With a little finesse (developer tools -> select ad elements -> delete) you don't even need to look at the pirate ads. In fact it can be easier to steal what you're after than to get it legitimately. I doubt that people just don't want to watch sports anymore. Culturally, sports are deeply ingrained in modern culture. It's just that the necessity of paying these huge salaries means the networks are forced to try to sell you a huge production: pre-match buildups, player bios, yesteryear clips, postmortems, and so on. When you really just want to see the highlights. As a European based NFL fan, I was quite surprised when I actually watched the super bowl in the US. It's damn near unwatchable. Constant ads. A play, another ad. I don't know if they even break a sweat, there's so many stoppages. But the highlights shows, I like those. Very high quality production, actually. A pet peeve of mine is the analysis. If you watch enough of it over various sports, you realise the pundits do not really say anything interesting. They have their draw-on-screen replays and such, but there's no real intellectual backbone to it. And they often say things that are not substantiated by the stats. It would be good if there were clear schools of thought in sports critique.
alphapapa 10y ago
So what? Some people think Hillary is a racist, and in fact the evidence of that assertion is much stronger. For example, she supports Planned Parenthood, which aborts thousands of black pregnancies every year--far more than the number of white pregnancies aborted. And, in fact, the founder of Planned Parenthood is on the record as being a genocidal racist, starting the organization for the sake of reducing the black population, and even going so far as paying black preachers to encourage their congregations to have abortions! Yet Trump vocally opposes Planned Parenthood. So one candidate supports an organization that controls and reduces the black population, while the other candidate opposes that organization. Now, which candidate is racist?
- krapp 10y ago
  This assertion that Hillary Clinton is racist seems to reply on accepting as fact that the goal of Planned Parenthood is the extermination of the African American population, and that Clinton's support of the organization is evidence that she must support that ideal. Meanwhile one only has to Google for a second or two to find plenty of documentation of Donald Trump's racist ideals. Claiming that the former is "much stronger" evidence than the latter requires, after accepting a rather uncharitable interpretation of Planned Parenthood's purpose, completely ignoring the circumstantial evidence of Trump's own racist views (which, of course, many Trump supporters are going to do, as they are convinced the entirety of the media is directly controlled by the DNC, and all negative reporting on Trump is slander and propaganda.) Asserting that Trump's opposition to Planned Parenthood is evidence of his lack of racism ignores the fact that the Republican Party's platform is to oppose abortion and contraception in their entirety in order to appeal to Christian conservatives and Catholic voters. That opposition would be there regardless of the demographics of the aborted, because it's required to be a Republican presidential candidate. In any case, the argument you've laid out here (but haven't really supported) for Clinton being the more racist of the two is not very compelling, unless one is already extremist enough to consider it tautological, in which case you're only preaching to the choir and not likely to convince anyone.
  - alphapapa 10y ago
    First, I appreciate your reasonable reply. I'll respond to your specific points: > This assertion that Hillary Clinton is racist Note that I didn't make that assertion myself; the GP spoke about people who "maybe think Trump is a racist," and so I pointed out people who may think the same about Clinton. > seems to reply on accepting as fact that the goal of Planned Parenthood is the extermination of the African American population There are three relevant questions here: 1. What was the original goal of the organization? 2. What is the current goal of the organization? 3. What is the current effect of the organization? The answer to the first question is a historical one, and the record seems clear that its original purpose was explicitly to reduce the black population. The answer to the second question is debatable since 1) it depends on whose words one takes at face value, and 2) it likely does not have a singular goal. The answer to the third question is, in some ways, complex, and might be better stated as asking what the current effects are (plural). However, looking at the statistics provides an unambiguous picture as to which racial populations are more reduced by the organization's efforts. It is a simple fact that more black pregnancies are aborted, and that more PP abortion clinics are in low-income, minority areas. Therefore it is a simple statistical fact that PP reduces or controls the black population more than the white population. >and that Clinton's support of the organization is evidence that she must support that ideal. Only she can say for certain which ideals she supports. However, it is a fact that this organization which she supports reduces the black population more than it reduces the white population. Therefore, even if she were not racist in intention, her policies are racist in effect. Therefore we are left with this question: Why does she support a policy which supports a racist organization? Does she think that there are benefits which outweigh racist side-effects? If so, she certainly wouldn't admit it, as that would be political suicide. Does she not realize that the effect of the organization is racially biased? If so, that would call into question her competency. Or does she think that the current political climate makes it necessary for her to support it to win the election? If so, that would call into question her integrity. I don't like Trump, and I don't want him to be our President. But regarding the question of racism, the answer seems clear to me: if either candidate is a racist, it would be the one whose policies effectively reduce the black population. After all, what is more racist than preventing members of a race from existing. > In any case, the argument you've laid out here (but haven't really supported) for Clinton being the more racist of the two is not very compelling, unless one is already extremist enough... Here you tip your hand and show your own extreme bias. According to you, anyone who thinks Clinton is closer to being a racist than Trump is an "extremist." This is not reasonable or civil. > you're only preaching to the choir and not likely to convince anyone. I agree completely. Few people are both convincible and reasonable. Few can admit to their intellect the flaws of their dear leaders and adjust their conclusions accordingly. And contemporary media increasingly exacerbates this problem. I'm afraid we are living in interesting times.
kareemm 10y ago
I worked at ESPN from 2002-2005. ESPN execs have been aware of the problem since at least that long ago. Subscriber fees are where ESPN makes most of its money, so the execs have been understandably loathe to cut the cord. Even back in 2004 the goal was to drive more cable subs and more revenue per cable sub because the revenue dwarfed what they could make online (IIRC ESPN.com made ~$60M top line in 2004. Not even a drop in the bucket compared to revenue from cable subscribers). Strategically ESPN is in a difficult position. They provide distribution to content providers (the leagues) in an era when the price of distribution is approaching zero. Which is why you see MLB, NFL, etc going straight to consumer over the internet with their own offerings. The importance of TV distribution is diminishing, which leaves ESPN with no content (they've never really been a content company) and no distribution. Interesting times, indeed.
- jknoepfler 10y ago
  It's always interesting to hear what's going on inside a company like ESPN. Companies seem to spring up organically around their original revenue source, so having to re-purpose your machine to create a new one must be a very interesting challenge.
- thomasthomas 10y ago
  they've never really been a content company you changed my perspective with this comment.youre so right. essentially everything espn creates to fill time between live events is garbage. only issue for leagues distributing content themselves is local/regional tv contracts are a huge source of revenue for most teams. Tv is still the path of least resistance to consuming content. local deals might not be as lucrative if not on Tv. customers in a given region might not be 'stumbling' onto a local game to watch as often if the game isnt on a tv channel
  - selimthegrim 10y ago
    The one time they had an interesting show (Playmakers), the NFL twisted their arm to cancel it.
tomohawk 10y ago
Sports used to be the one thing people could just enjoy. There wasn't any political bullshit or social shaming. Just competition and pageantry. It was one of the very few things someone could just go all out for and not worry about it. People of different political factions, races, and what have you could all go to the same bar and just watch their team. That is no longer the case, and so this makes following sports much less desirable. The NFL has allowed players to hijack the sport platform to make their own political points. This is like pissing in your drinking water. Since the NFL did not remove or sanction these players, they are at least tacitly agreeing with them. Note to NFL: on any given political issue, 1/3 will agree, 1/3 will be mildly uncomfortable, and 1/3 will be pissed off. Can you really afford to lose 1/3 of your followers? It just is mind boggling that the leadership of the NFL is so inept that they didn't see this coming when they got in bed with the political folks. Yay! Another aspect of life has been politicized for no good reason.
- loso 10y ago
  The NFL has already been politicized. It has mostly tilted right wing. The rah rah pro military stance after 9/11 (which I overall agree with) that still continues now. The Breast cancer awareness ribbons. The debate over the Washington Redskins name. The concussion issue. The harassment and trouble gay players have. Controversy over coaching hiring. There have been a bunch of political issues that have beset the NFL in recent years. NBA players while not kneeling during the anthem, have taken a similar stance as Kaepernick in recent years and their ratings are similar to the years before.
  - gspetr 10y ago
    Other than the pro-military how is any of the rest right wing? Do you think the NFL's refusal to allow Dallas' players to honor slain police officers is also right wing?
    - loso 10y ago
      I was speaking in general that the NFL tends to lean more right wing, not these particular issues. I probably should have made that more clear.
s900608 10y ago
Death
s900608 10y ago
Lightning
cnnsucks 10y ago
I want the grievance mongers in the media, academe and government to stop filling the minds of minorities with hate for white people. I want you to stop trying to criminalize me for owning firearms. I want the elites you vote for to stop air dropping "refugees" on our towns and schools and then condemning us from their high offices and the safety of their gated communities for complaining about it. I want the working class to stop having to compete with the disposable subjects of unregulated third world hellholes on behalf of the donors of the leaders you elect. I want you to stop elevating thug-life gangbangers like Trayvon Martin and Micheal Brown to SJW sainthood when their violent behavior finally catches up with them. I want you to stop pulling up the ladder on behalf of your "values", be they your extremist environmentalism or knee-jerk anti-capitalism or whatever, so that social mobility can reemerge and provide some opportunities for the bottom half. I want the rent seekers you ensconce through the statists you elect to experience a degree of instability in their world and a few setbacks in their schemes. And thanks for asking.
- aswanson 10y ago
  Dude, there are like...10000 other places on the internet to air your right wing safe-space violation grievances, probably to greater sympathetic effect. Why bring your crybaby whining, conspiracy theory, all blacks are being trained to hate whites, cops are under siege stupidity to hn?
  - cnnsucks 10y ago
    Somehow we're supposed to discuss the rapid decline of ESPN/NFL fortunes without dealing with the obvious, widely known and unavoidable politics involved? That is not rational. If you want your little hacker safe space to not become another Internet flame war cesspool then see about keeping these stories off the list.
    - aswanson 10y ago
      You're an obvious idiot, as signaled by your handle and comments. Back to reddit and your daily limbaugh intake. Bye.
meddlepal 10y ago
The content on ESPN is just plain bad. I don't watch it, I don't read it. The on my thing I goto ESPN for is to see various game and match scores.
webmaven 10y ago
Odd no one has mentioned this, but it seems likely that Google is going to make a play disrupting the market for live event video. On one side is an infrastructure play by expanding GCP to include many video-specific capabilities for streaming, transcoding, distribution, etc., following their acquisition of Anvato. The other side would be helping all those producers to reach consumers (expanding the Play Store?) and possibly doing a revshare on targeted video advertising by expanding Adsense For Video or the equivalent. The only question in my mind is whether Google intends to become the Netflix of live streaming events, or if they will be content to remain a market-maker (AdSense/AdWords has worked out rather well). I probably have some details wrong, but clearly something is going to happen in this space. Check out this job posting for example, and draw your own conclusions: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=219675001 https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=219675...
the_duke 10y ago
Just as a side note, I would never, ever watch actual TV in the US if I had a choice. The way in which you constantly get bombarded with intrusive, disruptive and annoying advertising is just ridiculous. I don't know how anyone can put up with it.

330 points by kelukelugames 10y ago

My complaints about the NFL is really the ridiculous length of the games and slow pace. The games are just boring. I've turned to be more of a soccer fan. In regards to sports revenues, I thinkit makes more sense for us as consumers to just subscribe directly to the leagues for the content. I signed up for MLS Live and can watch any game I want. Cut the cable stations out of it. Make the leagues create a product that people want to pay for.

bdcravens 10y ago
Why almost all of my NFL watching is via RedZone. (though I have it as a bolt-on to my corded service)
- Touche 10y ago
  I find the popularity of RedZone to be bizarre; you're not watching football any more, you're watching a live version of sportscenter. If you don't find the games entertaining enough to watch, why do you want to follow the sport at all?
  - cjf4 10y ago
    If there's 8 games going on at once, and more than one of them turn out to be good, RedZone is awesome because you essentially get to watch all the good games at once while keeping tabs on everything else. It's definitely a different experience that immersing yourself in one game and loses some of that richness, but to say RedZone is just like Sportscenter indicates you're not really familiar with either.
    - Touche 10y ago
      I am, my brother-in-law loves RedZone and I've watched it with him several times. To me, it is as I described. I don't know how you can say that you "essentially get to watch all the good games" if you only get to see the scoring opportunities. You can't really get a feel for the game in 30 second clips here and there. Things that happened before the 20 yard line matter too.
      - bdcravens 10y ago
        Maybe its what Sportcenter used to be. Today its filled with weird entertainment, clips from press conferences, ongoing stories, etc. I'd bet maybe 7 minutes of each 30 minute episode is actual daily sports highlights and scores (not to mention the commercials that aren't present on RedZone) I think that's why the comparison between RedZone and Sportcenter was considered less than apt.
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    When my team (Cowboys) plays, I'll generally watch the full game. I also watch some SNF/MNF/TNF games. But yes, it's fair to say I don't find every part of every game interesting (like commercials, cheesy halftime commentary, endless review of plays that will obviously be upheld/overturned in replay, 2 and 17 draw plays, etc) However, filtering out noise doesn't make me less of a sports fan, any more than reading headlines on HN makes me less of an industry enthusiast.
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    Red Zone is mostly for fantasy football players. It's far too shallow for actual fans. The deep, tense, complicated, sophisticated overtime tie game the Cardinals and Seahawks played last Sunday was among the very best games of the past year but would have had near zero profile on Red Zone.
    - Touche 10y ago
      That's a good point; fantasy and gambling are two areas where I could see RedZone as being valuable.
hackuser 10y ago
At least as of 1-2 years ago, NFL.com rebroadcasted games with everything but the plays themselves edited out. They took around 30 min. each, and were pretty watchable.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hbosch 10y ago
  These types of game replays exist for both hockey and soccer. You lose context sometimes but for the most part the games remain cohesive and very exciting. Showing every pass, penalty, goal, turnover, and assist only couched by a few contextual seconds on either end of the clip gives you the full impression of the game without costing you an entire night... with the only setback being that you can't participate in the next day water cooler, if that's your thing.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    To be clear: The NFL broadcast I'm talking about shows every play, every moment of action. NFL games have 60 minutes of clock time; much of that time is spent between plays in huddles, etc. Thus 30 min can show you everything.
- rconti 10y ago
  Yup, it's great. $100/year. Watch "full" games (minus halftime show and commercials, so it's only like 2h) and "condensed" games where they cut out the timeouts, replays, and time between plays (which can be a bit jarring, but watchable).. and only 35-45min per game.
Touche 10y ago
It's always boggled my mind how popular the NFL is given that you get 5 seconds of action followed by 30 seconds of sitting around waiting for the next 5 seconds. Especially since "slow pace" is used as an argument against baseball.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  It's a sport tailor made for TV. Watch the action, then rewatch it from a variety of angles and with analysis. The stopping is actually good for the game, since TV allows you to revisit the play over and over again. If that's not your thing, I get it, but if it is, they keep you plenty engaged.
- WildUtah 10y ago
  You're supposed to watch the games with family and friends and share conversation and snacks during the game. The pauses in the action are there to give you time to spend with each other without letting any conversation get deep, meaningful, and awkward.

hossbeast 10y ago

So does this reflect a waning interest in sports, or are these subscribers going elsewhere?

maxerickson 10y ago
It's people moving away from paying for cable, probably people that don't have much interest in sports but were paying for ESPN as part of the default bundle of channels. I suspect a large portion of them never watched ESPN to begin with.
adamnemecek 10y ago
Pretty sure it's both. I think that esports are kind of displacing traditional sports for 'millennials'.
- Zelphyr 10y ago
  I've read that this is also true in the sense that many young players are opting out of physical sports. Coaches are complaining that the kids don't want to play a game they can't reset when it's not going well for them. The coaches, of course, see this as a bad thing but I don't think it's necessarily good or bad. It's just the reality that there are now more options for people.
  - Matachines 10y ago
    > Coaches are complaining that the kids don't want to play a game they can't reset when it's not going well for them. How is this not a bad thing? I certainly wouldn't want my son or daughter give up as soon as things don't work out. That kind of behavior spills into the rest of life, not just sports.
  - tdkl 10y ago
    Seems like a result of the babysitting in modern gaming. Also there's a lack of learning that loss and bad feelings aren't icky and there's nothing wrong with someone who feels that instead prescribing them medication. The changes in schools and helicopter parenting are these causes.

raverbashing 10y ago

This is good news Entrenched business need to suffer pain to move. In this case, not ESPN necessarily, but NFL and other content providers

maxerickson 10y ago
It's gonna hit player salaries pretty hard. ~1/2 of revenue goes to players. http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/11200179/nfl-teams-divided-6-billion-revenue-according-green-bay-packers-financials http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/11200179/nfl-teams-divide... $171 million of player costs against $324 million in revenues.
- seibelj 10y ago
  When you are a football player, and this is what you have been training and dreaming of your entire life, making $15mil instead of $30m, or maybe $1m instead of $2m on the low end, would not make you stop playing football and start selling insurance or whatever.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    I was simply commenting about where the money goes. Players capture a lot of the revenue, a decline in revenue will thus likely be reflected in a decline in their compensation. To your point, they can go down quite a lot and still be viable.
    - 36bydesign 10y ago
      Well that's tragic /s
    - seibelj 10y ago
      Gotcha, I was just saying how I doubt it will result in worse player quality, at least not immediately.
      - 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

Cord-cutting?

tzakrajs 10y ago
Netflix popularized the phrase in an attempt to create a movement of people who turn of their cable tv service (cut the cord) and switch to Netflix.
- Retra 10y ago
  That doesn't sound accurate.
  - tzakrajs 10y ago
    It is, but they have taken steps to distance themselves from that marketing bc of their strategy for MPVD.

wheaties 10y ago

The lack of NFL on Netflix and Amazon Prime is the only thing that makes me reconsider cable. I haven't but it hurts. Sports bars just don't cut it.

fingerprinter 10y ago
NFL gamepass does the trick most of the time. Includes RedZone as well. Sometimes a game is blacked out which requires a VPN to see any specific game, but RedZone and NFL Live are always good, as far as I've seen. https://gamepass.nfl.com/nflgp/secure/schedule https://gamepass.nfl.com/nflgp/secure/schedule
- streamingthings 10y ago
  There's also sites like http://hehestreams.xyz http://hehestreams.xyz that offer this — at an even higher quality — so you don't have to use a VPN. Reborn4HDLife is also in the category.
- jonknee 10y ago
  In the US game pass shows no live games which makes it much less interesting for almost all fans. It's targeted at hard core fans who want to watch replay games or many games each week.
- jrnichols 10y ago
  The NFL is one organization that really needs to give up on the media blackout nonsense, and get on the streaming game. the US version of GamePass doesn't cut it. Consumers really do want live games, not restrictions saying that they can't watch anything until everything for the day has aired. They don't want wireless carrier exclusives, or expensive satellite add-ons. The NFL needs to learn from MLB. The MBL.tv app on the Apple TV is fantastic.
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    how is MLB.tv different from Extra Innings? EI suffers from blackout bullshit.

draw_down 10y ago

If fewer and fewer people are watching football each year, I'm unclear what NFL's argument will be for charging more for the rights, or even the same amount.

a3n 10y ago
Maybe they just want to suck ESPN dry before they bother going to the next phase.

protomyth 10y ago

It just impacts ESPN the most because ESPN costs every cable and satellite subscriber roughly $7 a month, over triple the next most expensive cable channel. Yep, if you have a cable or satellite subscription, whether you watch ESPN or not, you're paying ESPN over $80 a year. At some point, the decline will be enough to kill these deals.

byuu 10y ago
> Yep, if you have a cable or satellite subscription, whether you watch ESPN or not, you're paying ESPN over $80 a year. And that right there is one of the main reasons why I don't have a cable or satellite subscription anymore. Very tired of subsidizing channels I never watched. Most especially ESPN. That and the trend of, "oh you want AMC? Well you'd better buy the super premium $140 a month 200+ channel package! You can't get it with just the $80 a month 120 channel package." And, of course, the ads. My money or advertisements: pick one.
- hxegon 10y ago
  The amount of ads on television is mind boggling. If I want to watch a 30 minute show, I don't want it to be an hour long event filled with ads for prescription medication when I already pay money to watch the show.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Why don't you get a DVR? I just start watching it a bit later and skip the ads.
- rjvir 10y ago
  Bundles are often great deals for consumers. The TV bundle is the result of decades of scale, iteration, and the free market. TV has a lot of weaknesses, but I don't think its bundle economics are one of them. The most successful alternatives to TV are also bundles, and the bundling is a critical part of their success. Imagine instead of paying $10/month for Netflix, you had to pay for each show a la carte (like iTunes). That would be worse for consumers - and creators.

bogomipz 10y ago

Sorry I'm a bit cable-consumer illiterate, can someone explain is ESPN a separate premium channel these days on cable? It used to be I believe included in the offering just above "basic cable." Is this no longer the case? I am guessing you subscribe to just ESPN now? Otherwise there would be no way to get exact subscriber loss numbers correct?

maxerickson 10y ago
It's still a packaged channel. The article links the source of the information, Nielsen’s estimates the subscriber counts for a variety of channels.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I think his point is that, if it were universally part of basic cable packages (which AFAIK, it used to be), it shouldn't drop more than basic cable subscribers overall. So I suspect, though don't know, that because of its increased cost to cable operators, it may be in a higher tier package on some systems that many people are not taking.

carsongross 10y ago

Cord cutting is a big part of this, but there is a cultural aspect in play as well: ESPN has been increasingly pushing a progressive narrative on its viewers, many, perhaps most, of whom are conservatives. The NFL is seeing the same thing, with big declines in viewership since the national anthem protests began. I see a lot of newly developed/developing antipathy towards professional sports among my right-wing acquaintances. What's funny is that the reasoning is often very similar to what my left-wing acquaintances had to say back when I was at Berkeley. As with the libertarian -> alt-right shift of the last five years, I think it is one of the more interesting sociological developments I am aware of, and largely unremarked upon by the press.

rjvir 10y ago
They are learning the hard way the drawbacks of being uncompromising in the belief of antiracism.
bogomipz 10y ago
>"ESPN has been increasingly pushing a progressive narrative on its viewers, ..." Can you explain what this narrative is?
- carsongross 10y ago
  An example: http://www.espn.com/espys/2015/story/_/id/13264599/caitlyn-jenner-accepts-arthur-ashe-courage-award-espys-ashe2015 http://www.espn.com/espys/2015/story/_/id/13264599/caitlyn-j...
- tzakrajs 10y ago
  Players refusing to kneel for National Anthem out of protest for police violence and injustice towards minorities.
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - bluejekyll 10y ago

protomyth 10y ago

I figure that the NFL and NBA will eventually be the only broadcast outlet for their games. MLB has a bit of a different setup (local team contract with local provider and then national contract), but I would bet the national contract will go away. The MLB is already doing well with the national contract getting in the way of a great viewing experience[1]. Apple is probably right that the future of TV is apps. I would expect college conferences / NCAA to unite and do the the TV as some point. I see ESPN (or their replacement) as basically Netflix for sports that cannot build an infrastructure that allows for subscriptions. Although, the MLB has done service for others and might just do it for other sports. I would say some of the value of the commentary on ABC / ESPN is diminished by their talk of politics. It has become something of a joke about what Bob Costas will lecture us on this week. People go to sports to escape and be with friends, and not be lectured to. Looking at the feeds I follow this is a bit of the loss of people. 1) I do love them having multiple separate streams per game (Home Audio, Away Audio, Home Video, Away Video plus alternate language for some things). The bitching my parents do when the game is on ESPN or Fox is pretty heavy because of the degraded viewing experience and inconvenience of it. Plus when they aren't showing the game and my dad has to revert to internet radio generates some commentary.

jonknee 10y ago
> I would say some of the value of the commentary on ABC / ESPN is diminished by their talk of politics. It has become something of a joke about what Bob Costas will lecture us on this week. People go to sports to escape and be with friends, and not be lectured to. Looking at the feeds I follow this is a bit of the loss of people. Bob Costas works for NBC and is never on ABC or ESPN...
- protomyth 10y ago
  He does NBC for the Olympics (edit: got that wrong he does the other football games on NBC) oops, I suppose I can just point to some of the other commentators.
  - maxerickson 10y ago

jknoepfler 10y ago

so ESPN: 1. consumes monopoly priced content (ESPN pays $1.9 billion/year for "Monday Night Football") with waning appeal. 2. produces content only to obsolete content providers (cable/satellite t.v. providers), appears contractually bound to remain this way. 3. (imo) has a dubious content model in the 21st century. The ESPN content I've seen has been standard corporate-cable lowest common denominator garbage that builds no trust with the audience. I'd be surprised they weren't dying more quickly, but it has taken me years at a time to get my older relatives to cancel cable subscription they never use (not just sort of never, literally never).

marrone12 10y ago
ESPN is unfortunately bound contractually that they have to delivery their content through cable providers. I remember reading that if they developed their own direct-to-consumer product, they could no longer be on any cable channels. That's why they've partnered with Sling TV and Sony Vue, whose numbers are not included in the 650k loss. I'm sure those services each have a couple hundred thousand subscribers, and anecdotally, many of my cord-cutting / sports fan friends get their ESPN fix through those instead of a huge cable bundle.
- Retra 10y ago
  I feel like they'd have enough leverage to get out of that arrangement, considering the large number of people who only subscribe to cable for the sports packages. It's not like cable providers are going to say "Oh, you put your stuff online, well, we're just going to stop offering sports then", as they'd just plain lose customers by responding like that. At least, that's my naive impression.
stinkytaco 10y ago
>3. (imo) has a dubious content model in the 21st century. The ESPN content I've seen has been standard corporate-cable lowest common denominator garbage that builds no trust with the audience. I think ESPN Films (producer of 30 for 30) as well as properties like the now defunct Grantland or FiveThirtyEight show that ESPN is trying to expand its reach beyond a cable only model. But you can't just dump your big revenue stream overnight. To some extent they are weighed down by their past and can't shed it fast enough.

IBM 10y ago

Sports is the thing that holds the cable bundle together. If that gives, the whole thing will fall apart. Right now the economics for content owners favors bundling (example: Disney forces cable companies to take a bunch of other channels with ESPN). In this really good report [1] about Apple's TV efforts (with obvious entertainment industry sources) they had this line: >Mr. Cue has said the TV industry overly complicated talks. “Time is on my side,” he has told some media executives. Eddy Cue is absolutely right. [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-hard-charging-tactics-hurt-tv-expansion-1469721330 http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-hard-charging-tactics-hur...

chiefalchemist 10y ago

That popping sound you hear is the sports bubble bursting. That said, best I can tell, ESPN is heavily weighted with traditional sports. For example, there's very little support of soccer. In shot, ESPN is like the GOP. That is dated and failing fast.

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EpicEng 10y ago
You guys live in such a tiny bubble. Soccer is gaining popularity, yes. That's great, but the NFL brought in 11.6B last year. The MLS? 533M. Hell, Hockey brought in seven times that. The NFL is the largest professional sports league on the planet. Soccer is still very niche here and most people watching ESPN simply don't give a crap about it (myself included.) ESPN is failing because their commentary is going downhill and they're trying to become a pop culture entertainment channel. More soccer would just hurt them.
- petepete 10y ago
  > The NFL is the largest professional sports league on the planet. True, but only just. By media income, the Premier League is projected to surpass the NFL in 2017.
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    Premier league is not American sports. ESPN caters to an American audience, which is exactly what we're talking about here. How is that relevant? Few people here care about European sports. And why cherry pick media income? Premier league made 4B. The NFL is projected to bring in 13B this year.
- j1vms 10y ago
  Association football (as in football or soccer, depending on where you are), through its various leagues, has much higher combined revenues than the NFL. In fact, the European leagues alone have greater aggregate revenue than the NFL. The NFL is of course one tightly-coupled organization, so comparison might not be "fair game". And yeah the MLS is even quite small compared to several of its counterparts throughout the world. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_leagues_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_le...

MicroBerto 10y ago

This isn't complicated. Just notice how all of the "neo-liberal" channels, magazines, newspapers, and other publications are getting PUMMELED. I want to read (and hear) about SPORTS, not get bombarded with human interest pieces or have Colin Kaepernick and European soccer shoved down my throat. And I'm clearly not alone.

selimthegrim 10y ago
I don't think that word means what you think it means
- todd8 10y ago
  Just to second this observation, see "neoliberal" in the Wikipedia. Nevertheless, I understand the parent comment's point (just replace "neo-liberal" with "left-leaning").
jomamaxx 10y ago
:) 'Liberal' - in every country in the world except the USA (and Canada) means 'Classical Liberalism' which 'economic liberalism' or 'everything not run by the Monarchy'. This is we call the Judiciary and Legislative 'Liberal institutions'. Economic liberals are kind of the old Bourgeoisie. The 'Liberal' parties of the world are more like 'Libertarian' parties of the US, but they tend to be more 'business' like, and not so much 'anti government' and the don't have this 'don't tread on me' colloquial/aggressive attitude. They tend to be somewhat left-leaning on social issues. 'Neoliberal' is a term to describe those who are 'super free market' proponents, i.e. Chicago school of economics - free trade everywhere, no government 'interference'. etc.. I think what you mean is 'left-leaning' or 'socially leftist dogmatically'. Also - European Football is not 'left leaning' - it's also what the rest of the world plays, and so do a lot of Americans. I've read some polls indicating that the vast majority of Americans are upset with Kapernick, and the corporate tone of ESPN is getting fairly PC these days, which can be a good or bad thing depending on ... personally, I think sports is kind of an arena where people want to escape political issues and just play sports. ESPN has made some PC decisions lately and I wonder if this has been a factor myself.

dcosson 10y ago

One thing about NFL rights that I haven't really seen discussed is they're so regional, and that doesn't seem to make much sense anymore, at least in big cities. Having lived in NY and SF everyone I know who's into football has a different favorite team, since they grew up in a different place. But the broadcast networks can all only show regional games in each area. There's no way to subscribe to all games from 1 team because the networks all get exclusive rights to different games. In the US there's not even a good way to subscribe to all games on a single service other than I think direct tv which is a pain in the ass and doesn't work for apartment buildings. This doesn't solve ESPN's problem, but for the NFL offering these two services on demand at different price points seems like such an obvious way to boost viewership.

djrogers 10y ago
The NFL Season Ticket package has been decoupled from DirecTV for a couple of years now - you can watch your non-local games on pretty much any streaming device.
- dcosson 10y ago
  I think that's Sunday Ticket, and it's only sunday day games? So if your team is playing Monday night, you'll still need an ESPN subscription, Sunday night you need cable or an antenna that gets NBC, Thursday night you need twitter or cable or an antenna. I think even Sunday day games in your local area you might not get, so you need basic cable/antenna for that. And not sure if you can watch many of these with a delay/on-demand. Why can't there be one service that I can just pay for and turn on at any time after it airs, like HBO Now?
- kodablah 10y ago
  I have a streaming device called "uverse", some have fios, some cable, some dish network, etc. Why can't these devices show it?
- infosample 10y ago
  > The NFL Season Ticket package has been decoupled from DirecTV If you can prove you can't get DirecTV at your residence. Otherwise you have to get NFL Game Pass and watch the game replay later (usually the next day), not live. http://www.nfl.com/watch-nfl-live http://www.nfl.com/watch-nfl-live

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

Call me crazy, but I have an idea and it's been kicking around in my head for a while. But, how about a wireless broadcast system for video. I hear you laughing, but wait. Give me a second. Have large broadcast towers that broadcast out digital (ok, analog signals that are carriers for digital output) signals that can be picked up by antennas in the home. Sounds crazy, right? It could broadcast sports, news, entertainment, you name it. You could even finance it with product placements (strategically placed in the videos) or just short ads (I like to call them commercials, but I am not sure why). You all are pretty smart, does this sound like it has any way at all of succeeding? Talk about cord cutting!

solipsism 10y ago
Seems like you're trying to make some point. No idea what it could be though.
projektir 10y ago
So, over the air?
LAMike 10y ago
Sounds possible, the question is will this be like a pirate radio for video? Or are you trying to legally license content and broadcast it locally. Hopefully I'm not replying to a parody post
- JBReefer 10y ago
  You are replying to a parody post. He's describing broadcast television.
kodablah 10y ago
Hrmm, what shall our company do to all of those people that can't get high quality over the air or just want better quality along with cable/satellite? We should have our channels appear digitally in high quality on the boxes they are already paying for! Sounds crazy, right? Oh, and then we can use our leverage (i.e. these viewers) and our congressional lobbyist to allow us to charge them to carry our content when not over the air! We'll call it "retransmission fees". Sure, maybe there's a side effect where our reliance on retransmission fees is higher than advertising, but who cares...we can have both! You all are pretty smart...these exclusive deals that we make for content that we make hard to obtain not-over-the-air will make big money.

Animats 10y ago

Major League Baseball's World Series is in progress. This didn't show up prominently on major news sources. It's three screens down even on the New York Daily News front page, after an article about former nightclubs of NYC. Unless you're looking for baseball news, it's invisible online. Median age of baseball fans is 53 years and climbing. When the median age of horse racing fans passed 50 years, racetracks started closing. Baseball as a big commercial sport probably has about a decade to live.

thinkingkong 10y ago
Link to some supporting evidence?
- infosample 10y ago
  Median viewer by age in 2014 - MLB 53 and trending older / NFL 47 and trending older / NBA 37 and remaining steady. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/06/what-the-nba-gets-that-the-other-big-sports-leagues-dont/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/06/what-...
jomamaxx 10y ago
Not quite. Baseball is not 'hot' but that does not mean it doesn't have a solid fanbase. The median age of 'human beings' in America is climbing :) Here's one example: home teams getting amazing ratings: http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2016/07/19/with-2016-season-half-over-tv-ratings-for-mlb-shows-rsns-ruling-in-prime-time/#2fe2299e46a2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2016/07/19/with-2016-... You'd be surprised at how some of these sports have huge fab-bases without the Kardashian media noise. Media is changing just as much as anything, and this is a key factor. NYPost/NYT have to keep up to Buzzfeed. ESPN has to keep up with Netflix/online viewership. Sports will have a harder time because the contracts are locked up and hard to access - whereas an upstart in Film/TV can come along and disrupt.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

brentm 10y ago

One thing is clear to me and that is there will be many wounded companies in the battle for attention. Pro sports and the ancillary industries surrounding it are not immune. Twenty years from now I believe we will look back at this period as peak pro sports.

legodt 10y ago

I'm sorry that anti-racism makes you cringe.

bdcravens 10y ago
I don't think that's a fair comment. Sometimes you just want sports, and it's fair to compartmentalize concerns.
pmorici 10y ago
Seems like if they left it at that it would be fine but by commenting on a political candidate they take it from a basic human respect and understanding story to a divisive political story.
golemotron 10y ago
It's not the anti-racism, it's the incessant lecturing. As an example, if Trump wins in a few weeks it won't be because half the country are racists it will be because they are tired of being lectured to as if they were.
- edmccard 10y ago
  >It's not the anti-racism, it's the incessant lecturing. Get it? Since when is "linking to another site" some kind of "incessant lecturing"? If you don't want to read stories on theundefeated.com, don't click the links.
  - CptJamesCook 10y ago
    "I find this type of messaging across all of ESPNs platforms these days." Also, if espn owned and linked to a pro-Nazi or KKK site, I'm sure you'd quickly see my point.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > incessant It's an incessant, continuing problem. There is widespread, serious harm done by racism, in almost every aspect of American life (ignoring other countries for the moment). Therefore, it will be discussed frequently. It's very unbalanced to say the problem isn't all these people suffering, but that you are tired of talking about it. I'm tired of talking about Aleppo, but my tiredness isn't really an issue on the scale of things. > it won't be because half the country are racists There is a lot of racism in the U.S. In your model, who is responsible for it? How is it happening?

heisenbit 10y ago

Editing, bundling and distribution adds value. But only so much value. Information flows these days more freely and on-demand. Quasi synchronous distribution of news has moved to social media. Like newspapers and telco's already cable companies are struggling to demonstrate they are adding value. It did not matter so much in the past but now more importantly they are loosing the eyeballs gatekeeper (and thus pricing power) position. Sports funding is heading towards a brick wall unless it finds other revenue streams. Which is in part possible as they have unique advertisement bearers. But as the bundling is not as big the pricing power of individual athletes and teams probably will be less as an aggregate.

Phlow 10y ago

I would pay ESPN $10 a month for an ESPN streaming app that had access to all the college football games (no blackouts), alone, as long as it didn't require a cable subscription. The current ESPN streaming app is garbage, compared to Netflix, and other on-demand interfaces. It's not available on my Smart TV. The quality of the streaming is terrible. It's slow to bring up video. The ads are repetitive and annoying, and it's a second class citizen with wait screens while local ads are up on broadcast. Comcast recently decided to institute a 1TB/month cap in my area, with a charge of $10 per 50GB after up to $200, or $50 for unlimited (opt-in, by the sounds). There are no technical reasons why they did this, it was entirely to gain more revenue to make up for the cord cutters. Their own streaming service doesn't apply to their data cap. The whole thing is garbage and needs to be completely changed. The moment Google Fiber or something better comes along in my area, I'm going internet only, and I'll just go without until they realize how badly they've managed to move with the trends and start fixing it.

mbloom1915 10y ago
I think you nailed it here - cord cutting is part of it (I've done it myself) but ESPN is failing to deliver internet content effectively. The 'watchespn' site/app is clunky, slow, and sometimes takes multiple provider logins to work. When you see how simple it is to watch the NFL on Twitter vs. the 5 step broke process of ESPN online - the choice is clear. It's too bad they won't upgrade basic site functions since they cover the most sports globally, including games with expected low viewership...YouTube has been an easier outlet for some to broadcast live.
- johndubchak 10y ago
  Well, at least now they have the perfect marketing spin, "We no longer have the subscriber base to support cost effective investment in this market segment. We'll need to increase our subscriber rates significantly in order to offset any investment in a new streaming platform." In short, consumers, once again, get screwed for the shoddy investments in technology by the behemoths.
  - 10y ago

ChuckMcM 10y ago

My wife and I "cut the cord" as it were this year, now with OTA TV and a Netflix and Amazon prime account. OTA reliably gets you local and national news, Netflix and Amazon between them reliably get you movies and recent television shows. And of course with Amazon you can rent/buy stuff. What you don't get are sports. You find that more and more those sports have become the single reason you might want to buy a cable/satellite subscription. I welcome their final capitulation to the point where I can subscribe to just my teams and not suffer blackout rules in my home market.

jonathankoren 10y ago
Yeah. It's only sports. This year the only things I can remember watching at the time it aired were (in order of appearance): Super Bowl NBA Finals Presidential debates World Series The only other thing I can expect is election returns. I really like the world of on demand programming. It's much more convenient, and I'd like on demand sports, but only if it's from the same day. I just can't get into watching yesterday's game. Maybe if I could watch today's game time shifted...
- _asummers 10y ago
  The live streaming packages offered by the various sports organizations are generally pretty good if you're out of market, but are still subject to national blackouts. NHL for example plays a LOT of games on NBCSN, which is only available via cable packages. I'm able to follow all the Philadelphia teams I care about in Chicago without many issues, but having blackouts in 2016 is absurd.
admyral 10y ago
My better half primarily watches E! (Keeping up with the Kardashians), HGTV, Food Network, etc. All have full episodes online, but require the cable subscription login dance. Even if I could get the live sports I wanted, I don't foresee these "middle America" networks and shows embracing cord cutting anytime soon.
- zaphar 10y ago

cdevs 10y ago

PlayStation vue is my new cable, month to month suckas

kodablah 10y ago
Lots of cable subscriptions are sans contract. PSVue could actually be considered part of the problem: they pay what is asked by these broadcasters and they toe the line with their requirements of how you can consume the content.

mbloom1915 10y ago

ESPN overpayed for rights fees years ago not expecting viewership to decline at all - nevermind so rapidly. I'm sure even at those high prices they make a boatload off ad revenue but clearly their poor content and lack of focus on a live internet outlet for games is killing them. Also, all their good employees left!! FoxSports has most of them..

fbreduc 10y ago

i blame these sports orgs, tyrants of content down to the minute details...like dang, give alittle to get a lot

mbloom1915 10y ago

The WORST part of all of this is how Disney owns a great video streaming company who built our a killer product for the MLB, and they can't apply it to the ESPN ecosystem, whose video player is TRASH.

flylib 10y ago

what's overlooked is this is bad for consumers who are sports fans, if Fox/CBS/ESPN/NBC cut back spending for sports rights and get less games, you will be at the mercy of the sports leagues online services to watch content who will have all the pricing power and will force you into season passes, this is naive to think it will just affect ESPN and not the other networks, content will be getting significantly more expensive in the future across sports/television shows

isuraed 10y ago
They won't have all the pricing power because sports will be competing with each other for viewership.

LAMike 10y ago

Prediction: Disney will buy Netflix and in 2021 buy the rights to the next 10 years of the NFL for 20 Billion, and raise the price of netflix to $25/month.

douche 10y ago

Their programming has been getting progressively more terrible over the last few years. I used to watch SportsCenter religiously, but I just can't stand the idiocy, the blatant shilling for the leagues, the political advocacy, and the puff pieces anymore. I watched it for game recaps, scores, and highlights, and just as MTV doesn't show music videos anymore, ESPN doesn't really serve that niche anymore. I'm not tuning in to watch Skip Bayless and Stephen A Smith yell incoherently at each others, or suspected-murderer-cum-saint Ray Lewis blather. The one really great source of content they had going, Grantland, and by extension, 30 for 30, they loused up because of internal political games.

lordnacho 10y ago

The question is whether there's anything really unusual going on here. It's quite normal for a business, especially one not owned by a family, to just keep growing and growing until it pops or levels out. The NFL as well as the Premier League are seeing a dip in interest, after a long period of expansion. The story of sports in the last couple of decades has been for more and more money to be poured in, more and more content to be produced. Well obviously at some point there won't be anybody left to sell to. Same goes with smartphones, cars, and everything else that you can think of. Now as for this particular market, what might have changed? Well perhaps the way we watch sports has changed a lot recently. You can basically pull live streams or highlights from any major sports event for free. With a little finesse (developer tools -> select ad elements -> delete) you don't even need to look at the pirate ads. In fact it can be easier to steal what you're after than to get it legitimately. I doubt that people just don't want to watch sports anymore. Culturally, sports are deeply ingrained in modern culture. It's just that the necessity of paying these huge salaries means the networks are forced to try to sell you a huge production: pre-match buildups, player bios, yesteryear clips, postmortems, and so on. When you really just want to see the highlights. As a European based NFL fan, I was quite surprised when I actually watched the super bowl in the US. It's damn near unwatchable. Constant ads. A play, another ad. I don't know if they even break a sweat, there's so many stoppages. But the highlights shows, I like those. Very high quality production, actually. A pet peeve of mine is the analysis. If you watch enough of it over various sports, you realise the pundits do not really say anything interesting. They have their draw-on-screen replays and such, but there's no real intellectual backbone to it. And they often say things that are not substantiated by the stats. It would be good if there were clear schools of thought in sports critique.

alphapapa 10y ago

So what? Some people think Hillary is a racist, and in fact the evidence of that assertion is much stronger. For example, she supports Planned Parenthood, which aborts thousands of black pregnancies every year--far more than the number of white pregnancies aborted. And, in fact, the founder of Planned Parenthood is on the record as being a genocidal racist, starting the organization for the sake of reducing the black population, and even going so far as paying black preachers to encourage their congregations to have abortions! Yet Trump vocally opposes Planned Parenthood. So one candidate supports an organization that controls and reduces the black population, while the other candidate opposes that organization. Now, which candidate is racist?

krapp 10y ago
This assertion that Hillary Clinton is racist seems to reply on accepting as fact that the goal of Planned Parenthood is the extermination of the African American population, and that Clinton's support of the organization is evidence that she must support that ideal. Meanwhile one only has to Google for a second or two to find plenty of documentation of Donald Trump's racist ideals. Claiming that the former is "much stronger" evidence than the latter requires, after accepting a rather uncharitable interpretation of Planned Parenthood's purpose, completely ignoring the circumstantial evidence of Trump's own racist views (which, of course, many Trump supporters are going to do, as they are convinced the entirety of the media is directly controlled by the DNC, and all negative reporting on Trump is slander and propaganda.) Asserting that Trump's opposition to Planned Parenthood is evidence of his lack of racism ignores the fact that the Republican Party's platform is to oppose abortion and contraception in their entirety in order to appeal to Christian conservatives and Catholic voters. That opposition would be there regardless of the demographics of the aborted, because it's required to be a Republican presidential candidate. In any case, the argument you've laid out here (but haven't really supported) for Clinton being the more racist of the two is not very compelling, unless one is already extremist enough to consider it tautological, in which case you're only preaching to the choir and not likely to convince anyone.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  First, I appreciate your reasonable reply. I'll respond to your specific points: > This assertion that Hillary Clinton is racist Note that I didn't make that assertion myself; the GP spoke about people who "maybe think Trump is a racist," and so I pointed out people who may think the same about Clinton. > seems to reply on accepting as fact that the goal of Planned Parenthood is the extermination of the African American population There are three relevant questions here: 1. What was the original goal of the organization? 2. What is the current goal of the organization? 3. What is the current effect of the organization? The answer to the first question is a historical one, and the record seems clear that its original purpose was explicitly to reduce the black population. The answer to the second question is debatable since 1) it depends on whose words one takes at face value, and 2) it likely does not have a singular goal. The answer to the third question is, in some ways, complex, and might be better stated as asking what the current effects are (plural). However, looking at the statistics provides an unambiguous picture as to which racial populations are more reduced by the organization's efforts. It is a simple fact that more black pregnancies are aborted, and that more PP abortion clinics are in low-income, minority areas. Therefore it is a simple statistical fact that PP reduces or controls the black population more than the white population. >and that Clinton's support of the organization is evidence that she must support that ideal. Only she can say for certain which ideals she supports. However, it is a fact that this organization which she supports reduces the black population more than it reduces the white population. Therefore, even if she were not racist in intention, her policies are racist in effect. Therefore we are left with this question: Why does she support a policy which supports a racist organization? Does she think that there are benefits which outweigh racist side-effects? If so, she certainly wouldn't admit it, as that would be political suicide. Does she not realize that the effect of the organization is racially biased? If so, that would call into question her competency. Or does she think that the current political climate makes it necessary for her to support it to win the election? If so, that would call into question her integrity. I don't like Trump, and I don't want him to be our President. But regarding the question of racism, the answer seems clear to me: if either candidate is a racist, it would be the one whose policies effectively reduce the black population. After all, what is more racist than preventing members of a race from existing. > In any case, the argument you've laid out here (but haven't really supported) for Clinton being the more racist of the two is not very compelling, unless one is already extremist enough... Here you tip your hand and show your own extreme bias. According to you, anyone who thinks Clinton is closer to being a racist than Trump is an "extremist." This is not reasonable or civil. > you're only preaching to the choir and not likely to convince anyone. I agree completely. Few people are both convincible and reasonable. Few can admit to their intellect the flaws of their dear leaders and adjust their conclusions accordingly. And contemporary media increasingly exacerbates this problem. I'm afraid we are living in interesting times.

kareemm 10y ago

I worked at ESPN from 2002-2005. ESPN execs have been aware of the problem since at least that long ago. Subscriber fees are where ESPN makes most of its money, so the execs have been understandably loathe to cut the cord. Even back in 2004 the goal was to drive more cable subs and more revenue per cable sub because the revenue dwarfed what they could make online (IIRC ESPN.com made ~$60M top line in 2004. Not even a drop in the bucket compared to revenue from cable subscribers). Strategically ESPN is in a difficult position. They provide distribution to content providers (the leagues) in an era when the price of distribution is approaching zero. Which is why you see MLB, NFL, etc going straight to consumer over the internet with their own offerings. The importance of TV distribution is diminishing, which leaves ESPN with no content (they've never really been a content company) and no distribution. Interesting times, indeed.

jknoepfler 10y ago
It's always interesting to hear what's going on inside a company like ESPN. Companies seem to spring up organically around their original revenue source, so having to re-purpose your machine to create a new one must be a very interesting challenge.
thomasthomas 10y ago
they've never really been a content company you changed my perspective with this comment.youre so right. essentially everything espn creates to fill time between live events is garbage. only issue for leagues distributing content themselves is local/regional tv contracts are a huge source of revenue for most teams. Tv is still the path of least resistance to consuming content. local deals might not be as lucrative if not on Tv. customers in a given region might not be 'stumbling' onto a local game to watch as often if the game isnt on a tv channel
- selimthegrim 10y ago
  The one time they had an interesting show (Playmakers), the NFL twisted their arm to cancel it.

tomohawk 10y ago

Sports used to be the one thing people could just enjoy. There wasn't any political bullshit or social shaming. Just competition and pageantry. It was one of the very few things someone could just go all out for and not worry about it. People of different political factions, races, and what have you could all go to the same bar and just watch their team. That is no longer the case, and so this makes following sports much less desirable. The NFL has allowed players to hijack the sport platform to make their own political points. This is like pissing in your drinking water. Since the NFL did not remove or sanction these players, they are at least tacitly agreeing with them. Note to NFL: on any given political issue, 1/3 will agree, 1/3 will be mildly uncomfortable, and 1/3 will be pissed off. Can you really afford to lose 1/3 of your followers? It just is mind boggling that the leadership of the NFL is so inept that they didn't see this coming when they got in bed with the political folks. Yay! Another aspect of life has been politicized for no good reason.

loso 10y ago
The NFL has already been politicized. It has mostly tilted right wing. The rah rah pro military stance after 9/11 (which I overall agree with) that still continues now. The Breast cancer awareness ribbons. The debate over the Washington Redskins name. The concussion issue. The harassment and trouble gay players have. Controversy over coaching hiring. There have been a bunch of political issues that have beset the NFL in recent years. NBA players while not kneeling during the anthem, have taken a similar stance as Kaepernick in recent years and their ratings are similar to the years before.
- gspetr 10y ago
  Other than the pro-military how is any of the rest right wing? Do you think the NFL's refusal to allow Dallas' players to honor slain police officers is also right wing?
  - loso 10y ago
    I was speaking in general that the NFL tends to lean more right wing, not these particular issues. I probably should have made that more clear.

s900608 10y ago

Death

s900608 10y ago

Lightning

cnnsucks 10y ago

I want the grievance mongers in the media, academe and government to stop filling the minds of minorities with hate for white people. I want you to stop trying to criminalize me for owning firearms. I want the elites you vote for to stop air dropping "refugees" on our towns and schools and then condemning us from their high offices and the safety of their gated communities for complaining about it. I want the working class to stop having to compete with the disposable subjects of unregulated third world hellholes on behalf of the donors of the leaders you elect. I want you to stop elevating thug-life gangbangers like Trayvon Martin and Micheal Brown to SJW sainthood when their violent behavior finally catches up with them. I want you to stop pulling up the ladder on behalf of your "values", be they your extremist environmentalism or knee-jerk anti-capitalism or whatever, so that social mobility can reemerge and provide some opportunities for the bottom half. I want the rent seekers you ensconce through the statists you elect to experience a degree of instability in their world and a few setbacks in their schemes. And thanks for asking.

aswanson 10y ago
Dude, there are like...10000 other places on the internet to air your right wing safe-space violation grievances, probably to greater sympathetic effect. Why bring your crybaby whining, conspiracy theory, all blacks are being trained to hate whites, cops are under siege stupidity to hn?
- cnnsucks 10y ago
  Somehow we're supposed to discuss the rapid decline of ESPN/NFL fortunes without dealing with the obvious, widely known and unavoidable politics involved? That is not rational. If you want your little hacker safe space to not become another Internet flame war cesspool then see about keeping these stories off the list.
  - aswanson 10y ago
    You're an obvious idiot, as signaled by your handle and comments. Back to reddit and your daily limbaugh intake. Bye.

meddlepal 10y ago

The content on ESPN is just plain bad. I don't watch it, I don't read it. The on my thing I goto ESPN for is to see various game and match scores.

webmaven 10y ago

Odd no one has mentioned this, but it seems likely that Google is going to make a play disrupting the market for live event video. On one side is an infrastructure play by expanding GCP to include many video-specific capabilities for streaming, transcoding, distribution, etc., following their acquisition of Anvato. The other side would be helping all those producers to reach consumers (expanding the Play Store?) and possibly doing a revshare on targeted video advertising by expanding Adsense For Video or the equivalent. The only question in my mind is whether Google intends to become the Netflix of live streaming events, or if they will be content to remain a market-maker (AdSense/AdWords has worked out rather well). I probably have some details wrong, but clearly something is going to happen in this space. Check out this job posting for example, and draw your own conclusions: https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=219675001 https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=219675...

the_duke 10y ago

Just as a side note, I would never, ever watch actual TV in the US if I had a choice. The way in which you constantly get bombarded with intrusive, disruptive and annoying advertising is just ridiculous. I don't know how anyone can put up with it.