Cord cutting began when people who didn't love U.S. pro sports balked at paying their cable system for the so-called triple play. I love ESPN, but their revenu

Cord cutting began when people who didn't love U.S. pro sports balked at paying their cable system for the so-called triple play. I love ESPN, but their revenue model was built on the belief that it would have extreme pricing power to use against its cable system customers as long as it locked up most of the important live sports events. ESPN's revenue model assumptions caused them to overpay for U.S. broadcast rights, to favor the NBA, NFL, and MLB over all other U.S. sports, and to keep raising their per-subscriber rate to cable systems. The price of the triple play increased most because the fee to carry ESPN in the U.S. is assessed per-cable-basic-package-subscriber, whether or not the subscriber watched any ESPN, Disney, or ABC channel. At some point something had to give.