The Death of ESPN?

What a cable war means

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I was, like many children of the 1990s and 2000s, a SportsCenter kid. Every weekday morning, no matter the season, I turned my parents’ TV to ESPN to watch highlights curated by a cavalcade of charismatic and quirky anchors. Stu Scott, Scott Van Pelt, Linda Cohn, and Kenny Mayne meant far more to me than any politician. Pardon the Interruption, for my father and I, was appointment viewing. Chris Berman was the NFL, Joe Morgan and John Miller were Major League Baseball, and Bill Simmons’ ESPN.com column was professional basketball. I was a willing guinea pig for failed experiments like Cold Pizza. I took Dream Job much more seriously than American Idol. When ESPN spent an entire year, in 2004, in an orgy of self-congratulation for its 25th anniversary, I joyously consumed every last ounce of televised content. I was a young ESPN foot solider, built for their glorious future.

Today, I don’t have cable. Since I don’t have cable, I am usually not watching ESPN. I would watch ESPN if I had cable. But I don’t—and each time I decide I’ll finally pay (a lot) extra and slap cable onto my internet bill, I balk. The incentive isn’t there. Maybe, one day, the incentive will arrive. I’m a hypocrite using a family cable log-in (not my own) to watch Yankee games on my computer. I care enough about live sports that I would probably cave and buy cable if this log-in ceased to exist. I could become an ESPN customer again.

Here’s the problem: the YES Network, which televises Yankee games, has their own app. I could simply pay $25 a month or $240 for the year and watch all the Yankee games I want. If my cable log-in vanished, this would be the next subscription, I’m certain. I don’t care enough about college basketball or college football to watch it on ESPN. I’m not enough of a football fan to hunt around for games when the Jets aren’t playing. There are only 17 Jets games a year, and enough ways to watch them (any bar in the neighborhood) that don’t require a basic cable subscription. I am, outside of baseball, a very casual consumer of sports.

And there are plenty of cable subscribers who don’t care about sports at all.

If you live in New York and do care about sports—tennis, in particular—the last two weeks were rough for you. Charter Spectrum, the enormous internet and cable provider, was in a battle with Disney over their quest to raise the fee cable customers pay to watch ESPN. Disney, which owns ESPN, wanted an extra $9.42 a month for ESPN properties. This was, in the words of the prominent Substacker Ethan Strauss, a huge ask—cable subscribers are a motley lot, and there are plenty who want to watch MSNBC or the Food Network and not the NFL or U.S. Open tennis. Charter quietly held most of the leverage in the negotiations. While all Disney-owned channels, including ESPN, were blacked out—infuriating that large minority of viewers who love sports and little else—Charter could afford wait out Disney for a better deal. Cable companies like charter are very large and diversified entities. If cord-cutting threatens their immediate business, they are now fully invested in forcing you and me to pay for internet access. They’ve gone into the mobile phone business too.

For decades, ESPN was Disney’s pearl, its financial dynamo. Now Disney’s stock is tanking and ESPN is getting shopped around. A tech giant like Amazon or Apple could buy ESPN at a bargain and treat it as a prestigious loss leader—or decide, at last, to outcompete the company. The sale, no matter the parameters, will probably be deeply humbling for the Worldwide Leader in Sports. The internet-unbundling has been particularly cruel to their business. SportsCenter has no raison d'être in the smartphone age. Highlights can be pulled instantaneously from social media or the actual league websites. As a baseball fan, I’m on MLB.com to watch the top catches or homeruns, or find any kind of game summary. YouTube and TikTok are repositories for highlights, too. I miss SportsCenter—the curation, the quips—but not enough to rearrange my life around it. Print newspapers have known the pain of their own irrelevancy for more than a decade now. ESPN, seemingly invulnerable, might be the next to go.

To go is relative—ESPN is not disappearing. But how much is the sports network needed? Charter knows football season would be a rough time to lose ESPN because the network has Monday Night Football. The trouble for ESPN is that it’s not a core money-maker for a cable company any longer. The leagues themselves, in the future, might find they don’t have to be yoked to ESPN either. Amazon and Apple want in on the action because professional sports are the last refuge of compelling live television. There will always be a market for Jets-Bills and Yankees-Red Sox. ESPN’s fundamental challenge is that it’s a network that’s all about sports and can’t claim ownership of its fundamental product. The NFL, MLB, and the NBA are the creators; ESPN is merely a vessel. There was a time when a league like the NFL might feel a profound obligation to ESPN to promote the games. The fans watched SportsCenter to see Priest Holmes or LaDainian Tomlinson break a big run. They needed Chris Berman and the boys to break it all down. Now, they’ve got apps and the leagues themselves, along with places like Barstool, to deliver their fix. ESPN is the fading middleman. Non-NFL ratings are down and there’s no particular road, in the era of cord-cutting, for a rebound.

The dispute between Charter and Disney was eventually resolved, hours before Monday Night Football. Who won? Who lost? Both sides were pleased, publicly at least. Charter won at least one large concession from Disney: Disney+ and ESPN+ streaming services will be made available to Spectrum cable customers at no extra cost. Charter’s carriage fee to Disney will increase but terms were not disclosed. The size of the Disney bundle to Charter customers will shrink from 27 to 19 networks. Charter could not follow through on its threat to dump ESPN entirely, but it has long been vocal about not wanting to charge customers for channels they don’t request. The lifeline for ESPN and all professional sports leagues has been the sheer number of Americans who pay for cable and receive sports channels without ever watching them. Those entirely apathetic to professional sports help subsidize the multibillion dollar football, basketball, and baseball industries. That reality, in the next decade, could be untenable. Cable companies like Charter are certainly not interested in the status quo.

The tech giants, Amazon and Apple, might represent the greatest existential threat to ESPN. They are far richer and can afford to take risks. If one day, in the next decade, Amazon purchased full rights to the NFL (Thursday Night Football ain’t enough) and Apple, perhaps, scooped up the NBA and MLB, ESPN would be crippled. CBS and NBC and Fox enjoy live sports, but they are all conglomerates with a dizzying array of business interests. ESPN is sports, sports, sports—and what is a sports network without the sports Americans care most about? ESPN would be a media company like any other, with its obligations and debts. There are TV shows, a radio station, and well-paid personalities to manufacture hot takes. This is a model that can persist; it’s not one that can, in the long run, succeed wildly. The 14 year-olds of today are not, like my past self, ESPN kids. Their brand loyalties are elsewhere. And their parents, if nostalgic, will only pay so much for a service the tech and streaming giants may render obsolete.