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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday November 01 2017, @11:58AM
from the American-game-of-FOOTball-which-is-played-using-your-HANDs dept.
from the American-game-of-FOOTball-which-is-played-using-your-HANDs dept.
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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ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More
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Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.
-- Groucho Marx's last words
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 01 2017, @10:31PM
My gym has ESPN playing on the giant TV in the mens locker room. For a very long time I've been subjected to 5-10 minutes of ESPN at a time. My observations are 40% commercials for old men products, 40% old male sportscaters and occasionally guests yelling nonsense about nothing at each other, and maybe 10% highlight reel commentary the kind of stuff you'd watch a youtube clip for if you weren't watching TV. The other 10% is weird banter, flirting with the elderly yet still hot MILF (GILF?) female hosts who appear to know nothing about sports and their only hiring criteria was affirmative action/hotness.
The commercials are moderately interesting because some day I want to age into being a cranky old man. Assuming I'm not already. So I know all the pills I should be taking in 30 years from watching ESPN ads, all of which have minor side effects like death or my dick falling off. For 5 minutes a day its kind of novel, the commercials I mean, not having my dick fall off. This is not a special sauce, AFAIK you can see the same stupid commercials on CNBC for example.
The sportscasters yelling is simply obnoxious. Drama, but not even good drama. Second guessing and monday morning quarterbacking and shit talking about stuff that doesn't matter. They're definitely not in a hobby selected for high IQs and it shows in their sophistry or lack thereof. This is annoying. Unfortunately it seems ESPN mgmt thinks this is their ideal content?
The clips are sometimes interesting but lets be realistic the UI experience is better online perhaps on youtube. When your coolest feature can be better replaced by youtube clips, you know you're in big trouble.
The 10% banter is bizarre, especially the female commentary. Imagine if SN or /. ran like ESPN and in every story about functional programming or physics experiments we had 5% of the posts be women saying they donno nothing about any of the discussion topic but take a look at my great rack. The best analogy would be something like 4chans /DIY/ having 5% of the posts being leakage (kinda gross sounding...) from /hc/ or /s/ (or /b/ ?). Come on ESPN guys, its embarrassing its 2017 if guys merely want to see tits they go online not watch ESPN.
My analysis is based on airtime its 20% better replaced by online services, 40% obnoxious and annoying, 40% kinda neutral but not a special sauce.