I kind of hate to pile on Disney, what with its stock down almost five percent today, but ESPN continues to drag the company down.
It’s the reason one Barclays analyst just downgraded Disney, saying that ESPN‘s reliance on the traditional pay TV bundle makes it extremely vulnerable to cord-cutters.
It’s already lost seven million subscribers in the last two years.
But that’s not all. It turns out that even if Disney finally relented and spun off ESPN into its own subscription service — priced at a hypothetical $20 a month — a new survey reported on Quartz today finds that 85 percent of people would not be willing to pay for it.
Oh, no, but there’s even more.
The survey, by BTIG Research also asked people what they would do if they could save $8 a month by removing ESPN and ESPN 2 from their cable bundles.
It turns out that 56 percent of the 1,600 people who responded said they’d happily ditch the sports channels.
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