ESPN pays $2 billion a year to the NFL for Monday Night Football and one NFL wild card playoff game. I've written for the past couple of years that as ESPN's business collapses that ESPN's decision on whether or not to bid to keep Monday Night Football would be the first big test of how rapidly that business is deteriorating.
What's a deteriorating business look like? In the month of October ESPN lost over 15,000 subscribers a day in October per the latest Nielson estimates.
15,000 a day!
Losing 15,000 subscribers per day is a lot, but is that because of the NFL anthem protests or because cord-cutting has finally reached a tipping point?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bziman on Wednesday November 01 2017, @02:39PM
If you don't live near where your team plays, it is often very difficult to get that game each week, without subscribing to both DirecTV and a ludicrously expensive NFL package that includes every team in the league. Do they think people only watch out of market games because of fantasy nonsense? Or gambling?
I want to watch one team. I want to stream all of that one team's games. And I want to pay for it. I'd pay perhaps $75 a season for that privilege (ad free, of course).
Sadly, the NFL is not a collection of independent teams, but rather a monopoly stuck in a 1980s model of distribution. So I miss all of the games that aren't nationally televised. And the more I miss, the less of a fan I become, and eventually, like baseball and basketball, I will lose interest, and that'll be one less thing I have to spend money on.