Some more on ESPN's declining fortunes
"..... Viewership for the 6 p.m. edition of SportsCenter, a bellwether for the franchise, fell almost 12 percent from 2015 to last year, according to Nielsen. Keith Olbermann, the SportsCenter-host-turned-political-commentator, put it bluntly on a podcast last year: “There’s just no future in it.”
SportsCenter is only part of the problem. ESPN has lost more than 12 million subscribers since 2011, according to Nielsen, and the viewership erosion seems to be accelerating. Last fall, ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in a single month, the most in the company’s history. The losses have helped depress Disney’s stock price—down 7 percent since August 2015, despite a big jump in the company’s film revenue thanks to a string of hits, including the latest Star Wars film, Rogue One. John Malone, the cable entrepreneur and chairman of Liberty Media Corp., has publicly suggested that Disney would be better off selling ESPN.
As subscribers leave the network, and often cable altogether, ESPN is stuck with rising costs for the rights to broadcast games. Programming costs will top $8 billion in 2017, according to media researcher Kagan. Most of that money goes to rights fees through deals that extend into the next decade. Last year profits from Disney’s cable networks, of which ESPN is the largest, fell for the first time in 14 years. The dip was small, about half a percent, but nonetheless alarming. Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG Research, says ESPN has been “over-earning,” with cable customers paying for the channel as part of their subscription bundle, whether they watch it or not. “It’s pretty clear that the years of over-earning are going to end,” says Greenfield, who’s made a name for himself as an ESPN naysayer. “The question is does it end slowly or fast.”....."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...e-future-of-tv-and-they-re-not-really-into-it