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ESPN, which laid off 100 people this week, has a multitude of problems, but the basic one is this: It pays too much for content and costs too much for consumers.
That didn't used to matter because, thanks to the way the cable industry "bundled" channels, cable customers were forced to pay for it even if they never watched it. Now, however, as the cable bundle slowly disintegrates, it matters a lot.
[...] But it's a pipe dream to think that ESPN will ever make the kind of profits ($6.4 billion in 2014) that it once did, for two reasons. First, as is the case with so many other industries, the internet has both shined a light on the flaws of the cable model and exploited them. What was the main flaw of the cable model? It was that consumers had to pay for channels they never watched.
And now they don't.
It turns out that there were lots of people, including sports fans, who resented having to pay for the most expensive channel in the bundle. The popularity of streaming led to "cord cutting," but it also caused cable companies to begin offering less expensive "skinny bundles," some of which don't include ESPN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @02:59PM (31 children)
About the only thing people watch live TV for is sports, and sports fans are willing to pay. All the other channels, cable or otherwise, will be forced to go through major changes, due to newcomers like Netflix and others, but ESPN will survive.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by WillR on Tuesday May 02 2017, @03:18PM (18 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday May 02 2017, @03:47PM (16 children)
There's an interesting analogy to the weather channel here.
Everyone wants weather reports (and sports). Nobody wants to provide it. But here, watch this talk show instead! And then feign shock when the viewers tune out, get their kicks off the internet or whatever.
News is the same. Everyone says the want news. Some people seek out actual news. Nobody wants to provide it, heres some propaganda and infotainment instead. Did you hear what some Kardashian said? Now act surprised when people tune out.
Its very interesting that pr0n is the only "honest" segment of the media where people get what they want. Ya gotta respect pr0n for that. You want "naughty SN posters" you tune into the "naughty SN poster network" you see "naughty SN posters in action". Not a talk show about global trade policy or Bill Nye the poz guy's TV show or whatever else is getting shoveled. High res T -n- A video delivery, the only thing Americans are good at. Everything else you're getting a panel discussion on global warming.
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Tuesday May 02 2017, @03:56PM (3 children)
Even porn disappoints these days. Because of just the same reasons.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 02 2017, @04:36PM (1 child)
What? I don't believe it. GIF or it didn't happen. Even a pr0n version of "panel discussion on global warming" could be somewhat on topic "Things are really heating up in the studio today, ha ha ha".
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday May 02 2017, @07:08PM
Have you watched playboy channel the last couple of years? Last time I did they had a friggin' talkshow with three people (1M, 2F) and one of the females was topless and the topics was boring (something about trends and fashion).
Seriously - it wasn't even artistic or sensual - it was essentially any boring low budget talkshow that tried too hard.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday May 02 2017, @06:15PM
I can agree with this. I was talking with a few friends about this recently as well. It's either casting couch or horribly overacted crap with fake moans. Some of the more amateur casting couch stuff is good. Though, a majority of the stuff I like to watch is actual people having sex they recorded themselves using a phone. Thats real life.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @04:03PM (10 children)
You've got it backwards. EVERYONE would love to provide it, but nobody wants to pay for it. The news rooms would give their right arm to be able to go back in time because they all yearn to be Woodward or Bernstein. But the public doesn't want news, they WANT Kardashian stories, AND they want it free. Look at all the pissing and moaning we get here when something is behind a paywall. OMG! Those EVIL bastards wanting to charge me money. Then the same people go an bitch about how bad news coverage is. Just where do they think the people who cover news comes from, just free from the Internet? News reporting costs money, and it turns out that most of the connoisseurs of fine news and reporting actually find fine news and reporting to be boring, so they go to where the Kardashian stories are.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @04:38PM (3 children)
I like the BBC model where the public funds news reporting directly and is independent of the government. Unbiased reporting is too important to leave to commercial interests or billionaire endowments. Those guys should go and buy a celebrity event or a basketball team and fill up the middle and back pages. The front pages need to be THE news.
(Score: 2) by n1 on Tuesday May 02 2017, @06:33PM (1 child)
The BBC is mostly independent of government.
Their unbiased reporting is not always ideal either, since they wont actually do much in the way of investigating themselves. The way I explain it usually goes like this: "The government insists it's not raining. The opposition says it is raining. The BBC reporter declined to look out of the window for fear of showing bias." ... They show both sides of the story, usually weighted more toward the government position as even though they are technically independent, they are still under pressure and threat from government to reign them in, constantly. They repeat government press releases as they are expected to, but they almost never look into the details of the proposals themselves, just report the spin, they have to wait for some other third party to provide that balance, usually after the fact in a 'what we know now' kind of a way.
http://www.spyculture.com/clandestime-103-mi5-censorship-panorama/ [spyculture.com]
A clip from "Yes, Minister" which pains me greatly as it's as valid as ever https://vimeo.com/155307641 [vimeo.com]
More recently:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/13/government-choose-bbc-board-john-whittingdale [theguardian.com]
Don't get me wrong, I think the BBC does provide a valuable service and are often the best of a bad bunch of media corporations, but they are not truly independent from government and they are not unbiased. Their bias just changes depending on the political agenda of the day.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 02 2017, @07:15PM
Kind of like the CBC: sort-of-independent: they get funding from the government, but there are a lot of Canadians who put pressure on the Government of the day to keep funding it.
But independent and unbiased? Better than CNN, but there is quite a bit of bias (liberal) still.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday May 02 2017, @08:07PM
I like the BBC model where the public funds news reporting directly and is independent of the government
But the reporting is funded by the government, so it is not independent of the government. And in fact there are people who believe the BBC is biased in favor of the government:
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @05:01PM
Vapid news programs on TV drove me away from TV news. Tabloid quality reporting is what finally convinced me to install an ad blocker.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday May 02 2017, @07:23PM (2 children)
Well, that is also because we are being asked to pay for it sight unseen. If it is at least at the level of Forbes, Technology Review or Smithsonian one would consiser paying for it if they had a sensible (no subscription, no javascript, no third-party crap needing to be installed, semi-anonymous payment) payment model.
However since most articles online are crap one would be hardpressed to even consider paying for the unknown.
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Tuesday May 02 2017, @07:52PM (1 child)
Sadly, the currently-in-place payment systems make it impossible to turn a profit by charging ten or twenty-five cents for access to a single article. If the credit card networks would further lower their fees - or if a proper micropayments service that allowed websites not be net-negaive when charging those kinds of prices would gain traction - we might be able to pay for our online article access per article rather than having to subscribe or buy far more articles than we need.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday May 03 2017, @04:22PM
RFC2616, Section 10.4.3 reserves HTTP response code 402 for micropayment. All that is required is a web server and web browser which implements a common micropayment system plus users who are willing to go web browsing with their digital wallet open. Given the idiocy of one dollar apps, there must be a one billion dollar market by now.
1702845791×2
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by jmorris on Tuesday May 02 2017, @11:38PM (1 child)
The news rooms would give their right arm to be able to go back in time because they all yearn to be Woodward or Bernstein.
You are half right. You are wrong that they want to be journalists, hold the powerful to account, etc. We just had eight years of an utterly corrupt and lawless administration that created an opportunity for a Pulitzer Prize pretty much on a monthly basis. Nobody even really tried to claim one. None. To the current people with the monopoly on the microphones, journalism isn't a profession it is a tactic. 90+% are on Team Blue and simply want to win at all cost and the few on Team Red (FNC, Breitbart, Drudge) are essentially the same way. And the few indy journalists who try to actually report get zero airplay for their reporting.
You are right that they all want to be "Woodward or Bernstein" in the sense of getting the scalp of an "Enemy of the Party" so expect many such attempts now... but they are so incompetent now and have squandered so much public trust they probably can't pull it off. Trump was right when he said he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and his voters wouldn't care, we wouldn't care because we wouldn't trust the media reporting it.
This is not a good situation, btw, And no I don't have a solution.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday May 06 2017, @11:19PM
The last journalist I (knowingly) met certainly had an agenda. Specifically, he wrote articles which were favorable to pro-immigration demonstrators and only varied his output to increase virtuousness. If pro-immigration demonstrators killed someone he'd probably ignore it or spin it favorably.
Oh, and there was the guy in a makerspace who was covertly recording on his Android phone and then mis-quoted people anyhow. Oh yeah, and then there was the little guy in the wheelchair who similarly mis-quoted people. That was a blatent case of affirmitive action. If you're going to mis-quote people then make sure that grammar and slang are credible. Overall, I presume that it is easier aggregate, plagurize and fabricate rather than obtain the truth.
1702845791×2
(Score: 3, Informative) by fyngyrz on Tuesday May 02 2017, @05:53PM
Weather reports, perhaps that's near the mark. Spectator sports? No.
While I'm all for participation – which I see as healthy and fun – my interest in spectator sports is about as near zero as possible. "Everyone" is hyperbolic. Unless I'm the only one. Somehow I doubt that.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Wednesday May 03 2017, @11:35AM
Peanuts.
ESPN's costs come from paying the teams and funding all these 100 million dollar athlete salaries. ESPN needs filler, but that is about 1 cent of the cost of the channel.
(Score: 2) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Tuesday May 02 2017, @03:19PM
About the only thing people watch live TV for is sports, and sports fans are willing to pay.
I guess the point here is that everyone else who doesn't watch this don't want to pay for it.
Death-match vim vs emacs is the best. Joystick that, ESPN.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 02 2017, @03:28PM (3 children)
Yeah, I really don't understand this hand-wringing by ESPN. It's really simple: all they need to do is jack up their prices. Even if they raise their prices five-fold, the sports fans will happily pay that to keep access to sports programming. They'll even take out a second mortgage on their house if they have to. There's no practical limit to how much ESPN can raise their prices; their followers are addicts, and addicts will stop at nothing to get their fix.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 02 2017, @04:33PM
Younger sports addicts sometimes Know Other Distribution Interfaces, which happen to be free.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday May 02 2017, @05:23PM
Personally, I enjoy baseball, but not on ESPN. They just really don't do it for me. Sometimes they seem like they've never seen the game before, much less understand it. They'll need to up their game (so to speak) if they want the sports fans to pay.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday May 03 2017, @12:33AM
What they need to do is start leaving politics and the heavy-handed and patronizing "identity politics and diversity for its own sake" bullshit the fuck out of their shows (as far as I know the print version of their magazine is still great, and always has been, even if you're not a sports fan they have cool articles about sports technology and medicine). If that means laying off more of their talking heads who aren't sportscasters, so be it.
The core sports audience has always included a heavy minority component, but the issue is that those minorities have relatively conservative mindsets and don't want to keep picking the scabs of identity politics. In America, sports unite much more than they divide, and if you don't believe me go into any sports bar and see for yourself (though sometimes I wish we did embrace European-style hooliganism). Think of a sports bar, for example, when the diverse crowd is getting along and having a good time, and then along comes a show about oppression and minority underrepresentation and whatnot, and the bar goes totally silent while everybody rolls their eyes and scratches the backs of their heads and the crickets stridulate.
It's the same thing you see happening to Marvel comics. Yeah, they've always been about diversity and inclusion, but played to their strengths and their core audience. Now their sales are dropping for the same reason ESPN's are -- forsaking their core audience in a heavy-handed political attempt to pander to the identity politics types, inserting divisive "check your privilege" and "using the right pronouns" bullshit into their strips, etc. That is not empowering, it is condescending and patronizing.
You could say that the nut of the issue is that, somewhere along the line, "diversity" became the exclusion and demonization of Whites, especially White males, and not only that but the insistence that White males should feel some kind of innate guilt. And that's supposed to bring people together?!
(Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday May 02 2017, @03:49PM (1 child)
Whether they can survive may depend on how long their broadcast rights contracts last. If they are forced to keep paying for a long time amounts that seemed reasonable a few years ago but are not longer sustainable, they could be in trouble.
In the late 90's, there were a few previously successful PC chains that went bankrupt, not because there were no more people buying PCs, but because they had a lot of inventory and when the market slowed down a bit, the inventory depreciated so quickly that they had to take huge losses on it. So it's possible for a company to go down by overcommitting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @04:06PM
If there were serious sports competition that could step in and pay ESPN money for the broadcast rights, I could see the sports leagues letting ESPN whither and die, but it is in their interests to have a healthy ESPN, so my guess is that they'll let them renegotiate those contracts. This purging of people might even be ESPN's step to show that they are doing what they can to cut costs to justify contract renegotiation.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Tuesday May 02 2017, @04:34PM (4 children)
The funny thing is that you usually don't *need* cable TV to watch local team games; they're generally broadcast free OTA.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday May 02 2017, @05:14PM (1 child)
you usually don't *need* cable TV to watch local team games; they're generally broadcast free OTA.
Unless you're a fan of
A. a player who was traded to a non-local club,
B. the club of the non-local college that you attended or that your son or daughter attends,
C. a club from which you moved away following a shift in the job market, or
D. your local non-football club whose matches are shown on some regional cable sports network instead of OTA [slashdot.org].
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Tuesday May 02 2017, @06:29PM
A, B, C, and D are all not exceptions to my post, which specifically referred to "local team games".
In any event, you're right that there are use cases not covered by OTA broadcasts, but even if sports viewers who watch local teams aren't the majority (which I seriously doubt), they certainly make up a large enough segment of the viewing public to really hurt if they disappear from the customer list of the cable networks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @05:42PM (1 child)
Not in my area. There is the standard "big three" network NFL games on Sunday, but almost all the baseball, basketball, and hockey games are carried on the regional sports network cable station. For instance, you get one baseball game a week OTA where I live, and I'm in the overlapping market of two MLB teams. ESPN moved essentially the entire college football postseason off ABC and over to cable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 02 2017, @07:19PM
And I am thankful for this change. I remember when I was a kid in the 80's and baseball was on all the time. WUAB in Cleveland ran Indians games constantly despite the fact there were only 6 people in the stands. By the time the Series began in the fall, I was sick to death of baseball. Not everyone feels like every single game is a "can't miss" event when there will be yet another one tomorrow night. I feel no compulsion to memorize statistics, players, or anything else spectator sports related. In fact, I just don't give a shit.
Rising cable costs, driven by unavoidable sports bundles, caused me to jump ship years ago. Now I stand back and laugh as the sports Ponzi begins its inevitable crumble. As more and more people like me pull out of subsidizing the sports junkies' fixes, sports addicts are forced to bear their own full cost of the greed they fostered among players and owners alike. Eventually, the price themselves out of the market. That's where professional sports are headed. Demand is not completely inelastic even among the addicts.