The article makes a point that if ESPN charged $15 a month for a standalone streaming channel, they'd need 43 million subscriptions to make up for revenue it ge

The article makes a point that if ESPN charged $15 a month for a standalone streaming channel, they'd need 43 million subscriptions to make up for revenue it gets from cable packages. In the same paragraph it mentions that ESPN pays more than $100 million for the rights to a single Monday Night Football game. What I don't see mentioned is that the price of content should be a function of how many people watch that broadcast. And disregarding the fact that some of these prices are locked in from long-term contracts, if ESPN loses subscribers, fewer people will watch the content and the price broadcasters will bid in the future for that content will go down. Cord cutters aren't all switching to OTA antennas either, so the usual broadcast networks should be bidding less on the content as well. It seems like an equilibrium will eventually be reached letting ESPN survive with fewer subscribers, which makes the $15 a month standalone streaming channel more feasible. The real loser in all this would be the sports leagues that can no longer command the same price for broadcast rights.