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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 01 2017, @11:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the American-game-of-FOOTball-which-is-played-using-your-HANDs dept.

Is ESPN done for?

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?


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by fustakrakich on Wednesday November 01 2017, @04:14PM (2 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Wednesday November 01 2017, @04:14PM (#590622) Journal

    You think ESPN is shit, look at what happened to the History Channel, et al. The entire nature of TV production on every channel has has adopted this horrible screaming sensational format that's impossible to bear, all designed to raise your blood pressure. It's unwatchable. AXN is all there is now.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @04:45PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @04:45PM (#590642)

    You think ESPN is shit, look at what happened to the History Channel, et al.

    Amen. Many channels aren't even worthy of the "entertainment" label. This is at least partly due to the 500+ channels running 24/7 vying for viewers and advertising dollars.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @03:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @03:27PM (#591090)

      Every channel having to be a 'hit' channel, rather than setting their production values/syndication fee costs according to their viewership. If they did, then many more channels could cater to a niche of a few hundred thousand to million people, and they could all stay in business and profitable, while not being the sort of runaway successes everybody expects today.

      For an example of this (that is quickly being corrupted by western influence), look at Japan, and the number of channels, networks, and smaller production studios producing content for their domestic market. Smaller than America and the amount of shows produced there are far higher than the amount produced in America, and certainly more than those watched outside of regional television.