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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: 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?!