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: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @03:01PM
Since Disney Co. (the owners of ESPN) all but require every cable package to carry ESPN if the cable companies want to carry any other Disney channel (and they have so damn many of them, they get to be this 800lb gorilla), then 15,000 ESPN subscribers lost per day says that almost 15,000 cable subscribers cut the cord per day