If ESPN goes to streaming, what happens to cable?
If ESPN goes to streaming, what happens to cable?
There’s been talk in the media industry for years that ESPN’s flagship cable channel would eventually be available on streaming. ESPN is owned by Disney, and in an earnings call last week, CEO Bob Iger said the migration was “an inevitability.”
Then the Wall Street Journal reported this week that the company is actively preparing for such a shift under a project with the internal code name “Flagship.” There’s no timeline given, but such a move might shake up the streaming landscape, and would definitely shake up the cable industry.
If ESPN was a person, it’d be a young Gen X-er. It was born in 1979, and the way we watch ESPN kinda dates back from that time, said Charles Schreger, a professor at both NYU and Fordham.
“It’s old-school media,” he said. “It makes money through selling advertising and subscription.”
Research from the consulting firm Madison and Wall estimates there are 77 million pay-TV subscribers in the U.S., which is down about 25% from a peak in 2012.
That means that content providers have to meet viewers where they are, said Adam Deutsch, who is with Deloitte Consulting and used to work for ESPN.
“You have to try to make sure that you can capture the people that are leaving that ecosystem, but still want your service. So the way you do that is you go direct-to-consumer,” he said.
Streaming sports isn’t all that different from watching them on cable, Deutsch said — except that it is easier for people to stop watching.
“It’s pretty inconvenient to cancel your cable and bring back all the hardware,” he said. “It’s much easier to press a button on a device and say cancel.”
It’s also easier to press pause, and live programming — including sports — has been cable’s lifeblood, according to Mike Proulx with Forrester.
Now, as “more and more streaming services adopt live programming en masse and especially live sports and news, that is going to be the nail in the coffin for cable,” he said.
Millennials and Gen Zers have been the quickest to leave traditional TV, Proulx said.
So it’s up to ESPN — the Gen Xer — to keep up.
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