Nielsen estimates ESPN lost 555,000 subscribers during the last month | Hacker News Reader

Nielsen estimates ESPN lost 555,000 subscribers during the last month

outkickthecoverage.com

138 pointsperseusprime11174 comments

Excessive advertising. In the NHL, they used to have nice white boards around the rinks, now they're all plastered with ads. More and more commercial breaks during games. Heck, now there are even 'mini-ads' that aren't full commercial breaks but just show up for 30 seconds then it returns to the action. Let's not get started with picture-in-picture ads like F1 has.

They've even started digitally projecting ads behind the goalie nets on the glass. It's just becoming ridiculous. Are they not making enough money already?

If it weren't for old people set in their ways and sports, I think cable would basically die. It looks like that may be happening soon anyway, as younger generations would rather just watch shows commercial free and find alternative sports to watch (such as esports).

I'm not old enough to have seen it, but I've heard some people say half the point of paying for cable way back in the day was so you _didn't_ get ads. That seems to be the case for newer, streaming services.

Broadcasters have been overwriting stadium ads for awhile now. Digital insertion was fine when it was used to enhance games, showing down lines in American football, following a puck in Hockey, and more. However the ethics around insertion of ads apparently escaped the industry, it would have been fine but I am awaiting the day where you don't know where the scene is real or not. They probably could put everyone in a Coca-Cola shirt in the stands with the tech available. More fun, they could digitally ad fans to stadiums.

I never liked when they "enhanced" the puck in hockey, but I think drawing the 10 yard mark on the football field is fantastic. It's remarkable to me how well that works.

In baseball, the ad behind home plate is often a digital one and when they show a replay, you can usually see the green rectangle. I'm also a fan of the pitch trackers in baseball (the box that shows where a pitch was relative to the strike zone rectangle). I've always wondered if the size of the pitch tracker box is different for each player?

The on-screen ads are annoying, but all the ads delivered by the announcers is getting a little much too. Every replay, highlight, and inning/period/quarter seems to be sponsored.

Everything is sponsored and the rest is badly-written/executed script. "Show your support, send in your twits/texts to get something<worthless> free". Or, "Be the first to see this or that thinly-associated xyz on our site!" The worst is the elementary level, leading interviews, aka fandering to the lowest deninator: "You just blew it! Tell the fans at home how bad it feels."

In today's era of high definition picture, puck "enhancement" doesn't make any sense, but back in the day when we were stuck with 17" standard definition broadcasts (which was also slightly warped by the curvature of the CRT screen and perhaps a bit fuzzy if your signal wasn't great), puck "enhancement" was practically a necessity.

Always wondering where that's done. I often hear about it, but it doesn't seem to happen in the UK. E.g. football cup this summer, the ads would target people from the participating countries, if England wasn't playing you often wouldn't see a product you could buy.

> but I've heard some people say half the point of paying for cable way back in the day was so you _didn't_ get ads.

There were at least three reasons.

1) In most markets, there were a grand total of 3-4 major stations. If one lived in one of the larger market then there might have been one or two extra PBS stations. Cable marketed 25 or 35 or 40 channels to the existing 3-6.

2) In a lot of locations, analog reception was terrible (ghosting, static, etc.). Cable marketed a crystal clear picture as an alternative to the ghosts and static.

3) Fewer commercials. Yes, in the early beginning, they did indeed have fewer commercial breaks. Some channels had none, or only had a 4-5 minute break between programs. Those days from cable's start are long gone today.

While cable did market itself early on as 'less commercial breaks', #1 and #2 above were likely the larger draw, and with the costs then (mid 1970's) of $20-30/month appearing smaller than today's $150+/month cost, it was a somewhat easy sale.

>2) In a lot of locations, analog reception was terrible (ghosting, static, etc.). Cable marketed a crystal clear picture as an alternative to the ghosts and static.

Which, funny enough, my area cable providers won't show local channels because we're close enough to the city to pick them up on an OTA antenna. Even though my antenna only picks up one channel.

> I'm not old enough to have seen it, but I've heard some people say half the point of paying for cable way back in the day was so you _didn't_ get ads. That seems to be the case for newer, streaming services.

And just yesterday I discovered my first "supported by product placement" disclaimer overlay in a Netflix show. Not a big deal, probably just them getting in line with local regulations, but it might be a harbinger of things to come. Not cutting up the goose that lays golden eggs might just happen to be something that high stakes capitalism is not particularly good at.

Oh wow, they actually labeled the product placement? I often wish I was aware of all the product placement I'm seeing unwittingly. In what locale are you and what show were you watching?

In the UK all product placement needs to be declared at the beginning. Lots of Youtube stars get in trouble for this in the UK.

Do they require individually mentioning all the products/brands (which would greatly increase recall metrics, making the placement more valuable to the buyer) or is it just a blanket "supported by product placement"?

The latter is what we have here in Germany and I find it rather unfortunate that it covers such a wide range of advertising influence: from lower rates for all that IKEA stuff one would need to create realistic backdrops, to full blown product praise like you would see on a shopping channel.

The disclaimer might be new, but not the product placement. The first season of Netflix's House of Cards, which aired in 2013, had an obnoxious amount. It even made its way into the dialogue, turning one scene into a 10 second ad.

"Is that a PS Vita. What games does he have?"

"All of them."

"I have a console at home that I play to relax. I could use one of these for the car!"

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/dsbaldwin32/clips/hou...

HoC has loads... like it had an iphone app (game) product placement. I tried to find the name of it, but found this instead:

"'House of Cards' littered with product placements | New York Post" - http://nypost.com/2015/03/02/house-of-cards-littered-with-pr...

like it had an iphone app (game) product placement.

Monument Valley. Although according to both parties no money changed hands. The producer simply liked the look of game, called up the developers, asked if they could use it and the developers said "sure".

It's worth noting that Monument Valley is an excellent game, product placement or no. It's often the first thing pointed to in the whole video-games-as-art debate.

Weirdly enough, I don't mind that as much as actual ads - at least I'm still watching the show.

That's exactly how I came to the same conclusion, that only the disclaimer is new.

I am actually quite torn about those disclaimers: once people have officially committed to product placement, any remaining internal unwillingness to compromise writing for placement revenue will break down completely.

The opposite is just as worse by the way: our public broadcasting networks here in Germany are producing some rather popular fiction, and they have started to implement draconian rules to fight product placement (after some sizable scandals where the money went to their contractors or employees instead of going to the nominally nonprofit networks themselves). The result is that any time something like social media comes up in, say, a cop show, they have to make up a new fantasy brand to represent Facebook, Twitter or Google. This severely hampers their ability to talk about the modern world. Imagine for example what would be left of The Godfather if you replaced all references to the "brands" of Catholicism (and Christianity in general) or Italy with generic placeholders. You might as well move it from America to the Shire entirely.

The influence of product placement is there now matter how you spin it. In House of Cards (US), the worst influence might not be in who paid but in who did not: iirc Twitter seems to be pretty much embargoed in the show, even though they are using it for promotion quite a lot.

Product placement just kills the pace of the show. My family watched White Collar together, and it had some really forced product placement from Ford. They have a scene where a conversation is happening in traffic, and the car beeps and then does the emergency stop thing. One character tells the other to keep his eyes on the road, and the other one responds, "It's a Ford, it can take care of itself. I'm keeping my eyes on you."

That was so forced and stupid my brother and I still quote it. It was so completely tone deaf that it pretty much cemented Ford as a company that is completely out of touch.

As time goes on, the product placement bit from Wayne's World gets more and more topical.

I take comfort in the hope that product placement actually works better when it is not implemented in that despicably crude way, and that eventually both sides of the transaction will learn to stay subtle.

If the cool hero uses a motorcycle to escape the evil henchmen I don't care much wether money was involved in selecting the brand of motorcycle. If he then spends a minute of screen time lecturing about the benefits of said brand, it should be considered a new category far beyond product placement.

Chuck had a rather infamous product placement for Subway in the second season that worked out pretty well. The placement itself was gratuitous and over-the-top, and it drew quite a bit of criticism from the press. Yet, I thought it worked well for comedic effect in the context of the show, especially considering the character involved and the contemporary absorption of Subway's ad campaign ("five dollar footlongs") into pop culture. Sure, I rolled my eyes at it, but I also had a good laugh because it was obvious that the show was self-aware in the way they did it.

Anyway, I only bring this up because, while I agree with you in principle, I think that in the right context, exaggerated product placements can be as palatable as subtle ones.

(Later on, when the show was being considered for cancellation, a massive fan campaign had hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans getting themselves some footlongs to eat during the season finale and mailing the receipts to NBC, thus saving the show for three more seasons).

I would really rather the characters use real-life brands than obviously fake nonsense brands. When someone uses a MobTel phone to call 555-555-5555 and request pizza from Little Kaisers, it seriously drags me out of the moment.

If they're using a Samsung, eh who cares. My brother has the same phone, I can relate to that.

I'm not sure about Netflix, but certainly on Amazon, Hulu, and HBO Go some shows get forced pre-rolls promoting other shows. Contextually it seems relevant but it certainly is a gateway to more ads.

My prediction: once Netflix growth flattens you will see them start making moves towards ads. This is billions and billions of dollars in easy cashflow that probably won't just be left sitting on the table by a public company.

There was also a push to put ads on the player's jerseys. This is already common in sports like football/soccer. It is just visual noise at this point.

I am fascinated that kids like to wear copies of soccer jerseys and prefer them to have the ads because that way they feel more "authentic". I laugh when I see similar bike jerseys.

My son will soon be a teenager. He has little interest in watching TV. His default is to go to YouTube and check what's new.

Cable TV was an improvement on over-the-air broadcast networks. It's had a good run, but serves little purpose today, being inferior in all ways to the internet. It's just not worth $70, $100, or $140 a month. Our bills rose and rose until we shut it off completely and permanently - there are limits, and TV executives don't seem to understand that.

Yes, and I don't know in US but Cable TV started with a lot of channels without advertisements. Now, you are paying Cable TV and the channels are full of advertisements, so it is not clear why you are paying.

The advertisements are subsidizing a portion of the bill. What portion, I'm not exactly sure. Even if it was a patently false statement and cable companies started showing TV with no commercials (or maybe 10 minutes per hour at the worst), $60 is too steep of a price. There is too much shovelware (or whatever the TV term is) for that price.

I understand that live TV has blocked times for simplicity. That's fine. There is going to be filler to stretch the episode. However, don't stretch the show out for 25 episodes! If you cut the filler, you can have 13 episodes of quality with more shows per year.

> If you cut the filler, you can have 13 episodes of quality with more shows per year.

The BBC model

It's like in Germany where each household/flat has to pay an amount of money per month (~18€) for stuff like public television, radio and some internet presences of the state. The TV+Radio portion of this money-grabbing monstrosity is called "Öffentlich-rechtlicher Rundfunk" (roughly "Public broadcasting") which still is plastered with ads all over. Also you get into this system when you move in to a apartement/flat/house because the institution that collects this fee somehow has the right to collect such information but is conveniently not a government body and not "rechtsfähig" (meaning they can't be sued). Also really convenient is the fact that courts in Germany have time and time again approved this institution's operations... Well, the rest of an overview is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF_u...

Well lots of countries do have public broadcasting. There is an extensive list compiled here. [1]

It even does have its uses, if it were not for the abomination it is in Germany. If it were not for the fact, that the public broadcasters are controlled by political parties and clearly are everything but unbalanced (ok, compared to the US they are, but non the less).

I would gladly pay the money for them, if it were not for the fact, that most of this goes into financing soccer rights and formula 1 rights. And some "Volksmusik" shit and such.

I have to pay (being a German citizen with our own household).

I could clearly see a real usecase for public broadcasting, not tied to advertising revenue, doing real investigative journalism and doing great documentations. But I am being naive here. And a dreamer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting

My blood also gets easily to the boiling point if I see the public broadcasters complaining about not having enough money while simultaneously opening a new radio station only for "Schlager"-music (old-fashioned music listened to primarily by old people reminiscing about the "good old times") and paying the higher-ups of the TV broadcasters obscene amounts of money...

I am with you on that track. Funny also to see how much money non the less ist generated (and used/needed) via advertising. It is the larges part of the monetary cake by far that is coming fromEZ Gebühren" (what I have to pay as a citizen) is somewhat around 1/7th of the overall budget (as far as I remember).

> not a government body and not "rechtsfähig" (meaning they can't be sued)

This meme has to die as quick as possible. The public broadcasters themselves are "rechtsfähig" and can be sued. Every letter you get clearly says which public broadcaster is responsible for it and that name is written in large font in its header.

They make use of a central office (the Beitragsservice) to collect the fees for effiency reasons so that they don't need to have employees for that in every of the nine local broadcasters. Everything they do is done in the name of one public broadcaster. They just happen to use a common brand name for that work.

Google found me this example letter: http://www.nickles.de/user/images/14/fa13e73ef7b155fc4455777... Note how it says "Bayerischer Rundfunk" all over and tells you how to file a lawsuit – just as every official letter of a public institution does.

This can be seen all over public administration. Your local tax office is also not "rechtsfähig" and you can't sue it (but you can sue the state in which name it operates). You still wouldn't come to the conclusion that you shouldn't pay

The broadcasters are a public body (and not a private firm) but not part of the government. This is similar to the position of the pension insurers, health funds, most Sparkasse banks, the IHK and many more institutions.

> My son will soon be a teenager. He has little interest in watching TV. His default is to go to YouTube and check what's new.

Of course. I'm 30 and if it wasn't for live sport I'd never watch TV and even that is going away: Sky Germany lost the right to the british premier league and before that the spanish La Liga. Both, as well as the italian and french football leagues, are legally available at DAZN for 10 bucks a month. It's a great deal.

However besides sports the program just isn't there. It can't be since its priority is to find the lowest common denominator and please everyone. Which results in nobody getting what they actually want. YouTube doesn't have those limitations - you'll find in-depth content for any kind of niche interest and I welcome it.

I can only assume that traditional TV is even less interesting to today's teenagers than it is to me, someone who grew up with it.

I love that the internet has enabled this.

Watching TV in India, where I grew up, was an absolute, unmitigated motherfucking abomination that I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. Bland, unidimensional characters whose only purpose was to act as a loudspeaker for what the scriptwriters wanted to convey. Idiotic moralising basically throughout (obedient daughter in law: Goooood, rebellious kid who wants to live life his own way: baaaaad). A story that you could predict from start to end after just Scene 1.

Fuck that. Out with the old, in with the new.

> However besides sports the program just isn't there. It can't be since its priority is to find the lowest common denominator and please everyone. Which results in nobody getting what they actually want.

This isn't remotely true. I don't watch that much television but if you look at what TV critics are writing, there has never been a better time for scripted television ever. Now that networks like AMC, HBO, Netflix, Amazon, etc. can produce cost-effective original programming, it has allowed them to hit smaller audiences are still be profitable. That allows for far more creativity that the old network model where you had to appeal to such a mass audience.

I'm curious to what all this great YouTube content that keeps people entertained for hours on end is. I personally find some of the instruction content pretty incredible, as well as some of the music content, but I couldn't occupy that much time with it. Especially with instructional content, I need to actually apply what I was watching to what I'm trying to accomplish!

It seems like with music content, I'm constantly fighting off recommendations of low brow content.

most sitcoms on tv worth viewing have adult themes / content, not available to large networks.

I believe very very few of the shows the parent post is talking about are sitcoms.

I suspect a significant portion of viewers are using the internet to see the programming (via torrents or streaming otherwise), without having a subscription to any of these channels.

I just can't imagine anyone but professional critics to subscribe to all these channels.

Oh, absolutely - don't get me wrong. The quality of the content has never been higher (if we exclude The Wire and The Sopranos). It's the format that's the issue here - there's no way I'll sit in front of the TV at a specific, network-dictated time, so unless your content is available as stream (in non-US countries), I will find other ways to get it.

Concerning YouTube content: For me it's a lot of about in-depth reviews of niche products. In my free time I work in audio and music production and being able to see a compressor, synth or DAW techniques explained in a series of long, well produced videos is something that simply wasn't available some years ago.

Yes. Youth of today will will sit in a room that has a TV and watch shows on their phone. TV is like Facebook for them, an artifact left by a previous generation.

> TV executives don't seem to understand that.

Oh, they completely get that, but this generation of executives are ride-or-die into retirement. They don't care about the future of their companies.

They're going to pick the carcass as long as they can, parachute out with everything, and leave it just in time to go the way of Blockbuster.

Oh, but they do understand that and that is why they also control the internet. Ok, just the tubes, but still. As more and more people start cutting cable tv, watch what your internet bill looks like. Up, up and way too much!

Exactly. It will end up just like landlines - no cheaper to cancel it.

Cost of internet+phone+TV = $150

Cost of internet+TV = $149

Actually in my experience:

Internet+phone+tv = $150

Internet+tv = $160

Internet = $165

We literally have tv and a phone line but neither of them hooked up because it's cheaper

As an additional data point it's the same here in Holland, or at least with my provider. I've never bothered to go for only internet, but I've also never used the phone or tv functionality that is available to me. It's just there.

A few weeks ago I got scared shitless because suddenly our landline phone went off, which it never does. The caller was apparently from 'Microsoft support' and out to help me fix the viruses on my windows computer, despite the fact that every single device on our network is Apple...

I have been trying to cancel my Comcast internet+cable connection to a pure internet one for 2 years. (I haven't even set up my set top box.) But every time I call them they give me a promotional deal which costs less than pure internet (@the same speed).

I'm 25 and I never had TV when I moved out of my parents house. I mean, I obviously had "a" TV, but never used it to watch TV, cable - I basically use it as a display for my PS4 and to watch netflix, that's it. My ISP wanted to bundle a TV package with my broadband, but I just have absolutely no interest in watching it, it's a waste of time.

I'm in the same boat as you. I have a TV and the cheapest cable/internet option I could get for the speeds I want through comcast. I stream whatever I get through chromecast stick and if it isn't offered that way I don't care to watch it.

My service comes with a set top box of sorts to watch like 10 different basic channels. It still is sitting in the trunk of my car unopened. Probably broken now that it has gone through a few winters sitting in my car's trunk. When I told them I wouldn't hook it up and asked if I could just not have it they kept telling me if I return it or don't take it my service will be disconnected.

Even my mom is done with cable and she is far from a techie. It's getting easier for the masses to not have cable.

most cable tv bills come bundled with internet which is half or more of the cost. the best internet provider where i live just so happens to be the cable tv company, so there's not much choice.

I've had cable internet for nearly 20 years without cable TV. I suspect that bundling effect won't be enough to slow down the hemorrhaging.

> there are limits

My U-verse TV was at least $120 a month considering I had two boxes and HD (why is HD a fee in this day and age?) I dropped it for two FireTV's with Playstation Vue and Netflix and because I have Amazon prime I get all the Prime TV and Movies. We pay $50 a month now for TV and get an unbelievable selection of TV's, movies, and Netflix/Prime originals.

I think the only reason we had ESPN was because it had to be bundled with the package with Bravo and E! my wife wanted. How many people are paying for ESPN when they don't need it? The bundling is completely out of control with cable TV as well as the box rental fees. How can Amazon sell me a wonderful box that has a great interface and has native apps for Netflix and other services for a one-time cost $99, but U-verse and Comcast want me to pay $20+ a month for their shitty boxes. Over a few years I've paid for those boxes several times over! Consumers aren't stupid. They've been ripped off for decades but its only recently we can get a cable-like experience with cable-cutting.

Sadly, the margins on these services are very high so neither AT&T or Comcast wants to do price cuts. AT&T is instead launching its Vue competitor instead of making its cable problem more competitive. I think these companies want to continue to milk non-cablecutters for as long as possible and try to bring back cablecutters with these services, which ultimately reward the bad practices of the cable industry. So its almost like the worst of both worlds.

At least in the US, there's a strong investor preference for growth stocks. This often drives companies to keep trying to increase revenue from saturated markets rather than stepping back reinvestment and paying a dividend.

The major sports industry may have a problem. Especially Major League Baseball™, with an average viewer age of 53.[1]

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/12/baseballs-advertising-worries...

Correlation doesn't imply causation may be the wrong phrase here but as people get older they have more free time to watch these sort of things. Therefore it's possible the older folks passing are simply going to be replaced by younger folks aging. I have 0 evidence, just proposing a thought.

"traditional" sports are also struggling to engage a newer audience

Then they should stop refusing to allow cord cutters to stream live games. They either need to renegotiate or break their current contracts that lock them into their affiliates having the only broadcast rights to games.

Seriously it's obscene I can't stream live in market Chiefs games in KC via my Apple TV. Cable is dead, in so many ways. Adapt or die.

> Adapt or die.

Yes, and you see how entrenched companies with old management deals with new stuff

Their current contracts are worth billions of dollars. Breaking them would be a total disaster. This situation is absolutely a catch 22 for the sports leagues.

And how much is the cord cutter market that isn't streaming any of their sports except NHL right now? All the cord cutters are just simply not watching it.

Good lord even Cricket is streamable from Willow. And few Americans watch cricket.

MLB deserves a special level of scorn for building the technology to bring them in to the digital age and then blocking a majority of users from seeing their favorite team. Local blackouts are fucking asinine -- especially when the service itself costs $120.

100% agree, NHL does this as well. Living near San Jose, can't watch a local Sharks game when it's happening. Tickets for playoffs games were >$100, and it's $25/month just for NHL.TV. Details of their blackouts: https://subscribe.nhl.com/us#blackouts

It's really just burning the biggest fans. I personally don't care about any sports, but if I did, I'd probably just find some shady streams online instead of trying to deal with all their restrictions, rules, and commercials. It really seems like they have no clue what people want, since they're unwilling to give it to them at any price. Smart business, IMO, would say, OK, you want no ads and no blackouts? $500 a year, or whatever. Figure out what it would cost and show people, so they understand how much they pay with their credit card and how much they pay with their time + eyeballs each month.

Edit: I'm sure the hardcore fans would take the more expensive package. You could even offer things like exclusive programming which would happen during times when commercials play for other lower-tier subscribers. Make it even cost twice what you're losing in ad revenue. The good will it would do for the brand, to even offer a no-commercial, no blackout, no contract, no BS option is not a zero-dollar value for the company either.

I cancelled my NHL.tv subscription because they subjected me to team/region blackouts despite _literally living in another continent_. Was a total waste of money - it could have been great.

Take journalism. You can purchase digital only for this much money, or you can purchase a digital + paper subscription for some amount more. Maybe even a premium subscription like the New York Times has with the crossword puzzle.

Why can't sports teams do that? Buy paper tickets for individual games for some amount. Buy digital access for individual games for some other amount. Buy digital season passes for another amount. Buy paper ticket season passes, includes digital season passes. Pre-order your digital season pass before the team goes to pre-season training and get a voucher for a free bleachers seat for one of the games. If you have a digital season pass, pay a premium to use an app which lets you decide which camera to watch through, control over rewinds, etc. Pay another premium to get get a version of the game, a week after it happened, with audio commentary tracks from the coaches and players.

It's not that hard, and honestly, they'd probably get even more money from the die-hard fans than they're getting now. The executives are just stuck in the stone age.

Stone age and profiting b/c people keep giving them money. Damned if I'm going to spend $hundreds on paper tickets, parking & over-priced junk food when the location of the seats(in said price tier) is determined by someone else to fit their preferences. The capacity for customer service is huge, but TV ratings and ads are all they seem to care about... tired pandering script and contractually required player comments to the 'great fans' notwithstanding.

Tickets for sharks playoff games are perfectly reasonable, especially considering what I'd have to pay in arenas in the east coast or the cost of going to a giants/warriors playoff game.

Where I live now, a Sharks playoff game ticket is cheaper than me going to a regular season hockey game.

NHL Center Ice was awesome when the commercial break came & you got the static camera image as the guy announced he has to hit the head and additional audio of announcers' goings on in the booth prepping for next segment. Of course, it couldn't last, I can pay AND get commercials; just like ad-free cable & ad-free sat radio.

The MLB service is pretty good, except for the blackouts. I think the issue is that they sell exclusive broadcast rights in team home markets. They need to find a way to fix that and if it means the service is $150 instead of $120, fine.

Can someone explain those local and national blackouts to me? As a european this concept sounds very foreign and absurd. Sure, I'll have to subscribe to Pay TV, but not being able to watch my favorite football (as in soccer) team is pretty much unthinkable over here, particularly if I already pay to do exactly that.

The UK does this with a lot of games - they're not on TV at all. Idea is to keep the fans going to the physical match.

Local tv channels have the broadcast rights for the home team area - like SNY in New York has the rights for the Mets. Their contracts specify that they have exclusive rights to the broadcast for their coverage area, so internet coverage must be blacked out.

To be fair, the average age of those viewers was 35 at first pitch.

Great article on the demographics of sports. NBA is the youngest fan base 45% are under 35 and PGA has the oldest fan base with a 63% are over 55 years old.

MLB has only 24% of it fans under 35 and 50% are over 55 years old.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/which-sp...

"The NCAA demographics for football and basketball are practically identical but they are surprising old (about 40% over 55+) and surprisingly white (about 80%), which clearly has as much to do with who owns a TV rather than who follows the sports."

I say NHL will be the last great cable sport: "The NHL audience is the richest of all professional sports. One-third of its viewers make more than $100k, compared to about 19 percent of the general population."

This is because as a former hockey player in the US it was cost thousands of dollars just for the equipment not even counting the ice fees.

NBA will rule the digital distribution in the future.

I think the NBA is by far the most forward-thinking of the four major pro sports and NCAA. They did just sign a pretty massive cable package that in effect for the next nine years and slow progress with streaming, but they are also heavily invested in finding new revenue streams to help replace what will likely be lost one day with these cable deals.

It will be interesting to see how the financials of that work as cable keeps bleeding customers. I think the entire situation will be a mess as long as these long-term contracts are in place. ESPN has rights to stream their NBA games digitally but you can't stream those ESPN games through NBA League Pass digital, nor does NBA League Pass allow you to your local team because that would interfere with local television rights.

As long as you have all these different rights packages in place, it will handcuff the league from producing something centrally that appeals to the most people. However, that type of service is also less likely to bring in the money that ESPN and Turner and the local sports channels are bringing to teams, so what's happening is in the best financial interest of the league, at least in the short term.

With the DirecTV NHL ShutOut package, people can enjoy all 1,230 professional hockey games each year the way they were meant to be enjoyed: by not seeing them at all."[1]

[1] http://www.theonion.com/article/popular-new-directv-package-...

this place is so stiff, i think you and i are the only ones laughing. cheers.

Grew up a Red Sox fan, watching free games on broadcast TV every week and attending games for less than $10. At one point in the mid-80s bleacher seats were $2.

Left Boston, came back 8 years later, found that you can only watch games on cable and tickets are unbelievably expensive. The Red Sox's new owners want to make a lot of money and hire top talent to make them a winning team. But not all fans can afford to go along for the ride.

Now I have a family. We don't have cable so my son can't watch 95% of games on TV. The one time four of us went to Fenway it was nearly $400 about 15 rows back from the third base line. How can anyone keep that up? He never got a chance to be a fan like I did.

As a youth baseball coach, I have noticed that none of the players talk about a favorite baseball player or team. We're cord-cutters and my own kids never even mention watching a game. Not a good sign for MLB.

Great point, I have seen the same situation and we don't have cable as well. The other coach and I can tell the kids that do watch a lot of baseball. Their baseball IQ is a lot higher... but they've copied the swings and mannerisms of some pro players. Those little hitches in their swings or deliveries hurt them on the field. The kids that don't watch baseball have some pure swings... its pretty... but they are situationally clueless until or if they really dive in.

I would be happy to pay for ESPN on my Roku exactly as I do HBO Now. $10/month max, cancel anytime. I would subscribe for NFL season only and quit right after. Otherwise, I use HD antenna for local games and the occasional streaming website for a game I really want to see. I really don't care for their commentary.[0]

[0] http://www.espn.com/video/clip?id=17823563

>http://www.espn.com/video/clip?id=17823563

There is no reason for anyone to get this fired up over sports.

Sports, as a business, markets entirely on emotion. They want people to get this fired up.

ESPN pays out an insane amount of cash for their deals with various sports leagues. Their business model completely relies on people who don't watch the channel to still pay them, and seem to be locked into that business model. If people who only watched ESPN paid ESPN, some estimates put the required monthly fee to be around $40/month. It's insane. They rode the gravy train for a long time, but don't seem to have an escape hatch.

It's actually the sport teams/leagues that rode the gravy train.

ESPN paid huge amounts because they had to outbid the competition. If sportsbroadcasting gets less profitable, sports will get less profitable.

That's an interesting question: would anything change if the average NFL salary was $500k instead of the almost $2m that it is now? My guess is no.

My guess is also no.

If you take the quarterbacks and the absurdly over-paid edge rushers out of the equation, and the NFL average salary starts to come down quite a bit closer to that 500k mark.

Some would argue that that bit of economics is part of what is diluting the product on the field. There is little incentive to keep mid-career, mid-talent guys around, when you can use guys on rookie contracts that are half or a quarter the price, for 75% of the skill. Except there's a lot of deficit in experience and savviness.

The average might be $2m, but the median is only ~$750k. So if you flatten the payscale then you could probably get to a $500k average with most players not taking too big a paycut.

But let's say you are 15 year old super talents that has every potential to make many millions in the NFL today. Would they still pursue football if they could only make at most 25% of the highest paid players today or would they focus on another sport, and if so which sport might do better in this future? Perhaps baseball or soccer will become more popular since if you're not getting paid a lot why risk the head trauma.

I don't believe any 15 year old who feels they can choose from among several pro sporting careers is thinking rationally.

They may then have a choice between obscurity and lower profits.

$10/m if there are no ads. It should be free if they are going to bombard us with ads. With online streaming they can do targeted ads and make more money compared to running stuff on cable or over the air.

Can't you do basically this with Sling tv?

Here is Bob Iger's response (Disney's CEO) to where streaming ESPN is headed (1)

Q: Some people have been thinking this new streaming service will offer a flat rate, roughly the $6 or $7 a month that customers pay on their cable bill to get ESPN. Is that right?

A: It’s not going to be that way at all. There will be really variable pricing and multiple packages to consumers. People may just want to subscribe during the football season. Or maybe they want to pay just for a summer, just for a weekend, just for a game. We will have customization and personalization. I think everything ultimately will be on an à la carte basis; a lot of people may subscribe to the whole thing and get a discount for that.

(1) http://variety.com/2016/film/features/bob-iger-disney-ceo-sh...

Considering how much money pay per view sporting events are able to charge, there is probably a lot of upside to the price. This could be a lot like movie theater tickets where the viewership plummets, but the audience that remains is paying 4x what they used to for the same thing.

You can basically do this with SlingTV. The $20 Orange package is basically ESPN, Disney, and a few throw-ins. That's probably the cheapest way available to legitimately get ESPN.

To actually watch most NFL games, though, you would need some kind of a subscription that gets local CBS, NBC and Fox channels, though. ESPN only carries Monday Night Football.

Does someone know why this is happening? This is not explained in the article.

I'm not American, don't have a TV and don't like sports but I'd like to know why they're loosing so much subscribers now. Is it the economic situation or people found a better alternative to watch sports?

> I'm not American

I can tell. Don't put a space after a question mark! See?

It gives you away as a Frenchman.

Edited. So now nobody knows I'm French! ;-)

I doubt those rules apply to French only.

ESPNs bread and butter is not so much live sports but highlights, commentary, and analysis. These are replaceable with online sources like Bleacher Report, SB Nation, and even social media. In the US, watching live sports on TV generally still requires some kind of traditional television access, but over-the-air broadcasters + a regional cable sports network will cover most needs in that regard.

They also do a really terrible job at actually showing highlights and meaningful analysis these days. It's sort of like when MTV stopped showing music videos.

I'm an American with a TV who doesn't like sports. :) So let me be the blind leading the blind here.

There are three factors pinching ESPN and I don't think anybody knows what the exact breakdown is between them to answer the "why" question. But I think the factors are mostly well-known: 1) cable cutters, 2) generational habit differences, and 3) ESPN's inability to home-brew compelling content.

Cable cutters are softer on ESPN's ego than the other two options because they don't have to take responsibility for it. Basically, this factor is people quitting their cable subscription because they prefer Netflix or Hulu or nothing over paying for cable. ESPN licenses their important content (the actual games) and this is expensive, so if enough people leave it will eventually leave them unable to produce their primary product.

Factor #2 is simply that millennials seem less interested in sports or TV generally. But this may be mixed in with the previous one.

Suppose cable cutting is the significant factor. Why isn't it killing Comedy Central and other channels? Because licensing is expensive and the product becomes stale. CC and the other channels don't have to spend as much to make content, their consumers like their home-brew content, and their homemade content is unencumbered and can be repackaged and sold on other media. I might look forward to a new episode of Comedy Central Presents, but if I miss it, I'd still like to see it later. If it's good, I may rewatch it. This doesn't happen with sporting events. Like any product with an expiration date, there is more cost.

Other channels like CC and Cartoon Network started out licensing other people's content and then started producing their own, and their consumers like what they make. Many of ESPN's consumers, by contrast, do not want a 24x7 news cycle about every athlete ever, or talk shows starring athletes, or whatever home-brew content ESPN might come up with. They want to see The Big Game, right now, as it's happening.

So ESPN is having trouble pivoting. CC and Cartoon Network et. al. had no problem making the transition from content licensing to content creation and distribution, but ESPN is unusually encumbered by licensing restrictions and is unable to manufacture significant amounts of cheaper content with a longer shelf life. ESPN grew quite fat and lazy during its heydays when cable bundling was unavoidable and you could count on almost every American as a cable subscriber. This usage pattern is dropping off a cliff and ESPN seems to have run out of workable pivots.

The anti-sports people like me are having a great time watching this whole thing unfold in slow motion, which probably accounts for the fact that this story is here on HN at all.

You kind of touched on it, but the biggest issue ESPN has is that their content goes stale very, very quickly. Sports are the most valuable content when live, above basically everything else. But as soon as you start getting away from that, their value plummets. Full games quickly become highlight clips, from which there are decreasing ways for a channel like ESPN to monetize (especially when the leagues themselves are offering those clips for free view). Past 24-48 hours, even a "condensed" game (cutting out everything but time when the clock is rolling) isn't really a worthwhile value.

By comparison, CC and CN's content can be re-aired for months or years, can be sold on home video, and be sub-licensed to streaming services. It also likely costs less to produce than sports, once you factor in licensing fees.

Comedy Central's business is actually in deep doo-doo, as they've been losing viewers and talent at a high rate for the last year or so.

I'm not sure, but I think the Colin Kaepernick national anthem controversy may be partly to blame.

Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted because I'm not making it up:

http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2016/10/29/espn-loses-621000...

FWIW, I have no problem with Kaepernick's protest and frankly I think singing the national anthem at sporting events is a little silly.

Breitbart ? really?

I know, I know. But I think they have some influence.

Give me a break.

Why?

Look at the comments at the bottom of this story:

http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2016/11/10/espn-host-athlete...

Not him specifically (covering his actions as matter-of-fact news would be OK IMO) so much as it is the increasing interjection of social and political commentary into their analysis generally. I come to ESPN/Sports as an escape from the real world. I don't want any of that there. Focus on sports: Scores, highlights, coaching and player trades, etc. Period.

Sports and ESPN are increasingly becoming political, which might take some part in this.

The main sport being played is how many ads they can have in the least amount of time and space

It's incredibly alienating

Yes, major leagues are to blame, what comes around goes around

TV is now to the smartphone what radio was to the TV. It still a viable marketing tool in some instances but has lost most of its power. Facebook is the new NBC. Twitch is the new ESPN (e sports are growinf like crazy). There is an amazing opportunity for those who recognize this and evolve their approach to fit the different mediums.

Yeah fighting ads on mobile is the same problem, just on a smaller screen.

Its a different problem because mobile is about walled gardens (I am against walled gardens). Fighting ads that appear on an app will become harder and downright impossible without rooting your device.

What is only touched upon in the comments but not often discussed in depth in these articles- is ESPN losing subscribers who had eyeballs on their content or is the majority of this continued slide the effect of general cord cutting rather than conscious unsubscribing? I would love to see some more detailed analysis on this breakdown.

Good? The games take entirely too long, not least of which is all the advertising that disrupts the natural flow of the game.

BS detector is high on this article

> But those sports rights costs are going up and those subscriber revenue numbers are going down.

i doubt sports rights are going anywhere if even espn can't pay them.

It's like 0.5% of their subscribers.

espn is only 0.5% of sports broadscast?

No, ESPN has ~90MM subscribers.

Luckily for us Disney shareholders we've been getting raked over the coals for a year now. Hopefully this has already been priced in. Plus, the ad revs for a captive (read: live) audience are pretty rich.

The cable network channels ESPN and Discovery are between a rock and a hard place. Bidding for content from entitled sports is more expensive but their customers are running.

Individual customers are cutting cord.

Resell customers are barking at the price of the packages. German public television decided NOT TO COVER THE OLYMPICS due to the high price Discovery was charging.

Emerging new channels (Twitter, Youtube, Amazon, Netflix) are getting their own original content.

It's ESPNexit.

Doesn't this also mean that cable companies lost 555,000 subscribers last month? The only way for me to get ESPN is with a basic cable subscription.

I have ESPN through SlingTV.

Not anymore -- most cable providers now offer a base tier without sports channels that are targeted at cord-cutters.

Netflix for international live sports is the next big thing. It's extremely hard to get around the licensing though.

Theoretically speaking... couldn't a startup mimic Uber?

An app that I can find someone who has their cellphone pointing at their screen LIVE with a game on... and I pay that person pennies to watch it.

AFAIK there is some sort of a loophole that re-brodcasting even live show by recording it off of your screen (showing TV frame etc) is not illegal.

Am I wrong?

Loophole's gonna get closed as soon as such service would gain traction. You don't want to rely your business on that

you right! I mean better not to learn Uber lesson :)

you are basically talking about all the streams you can find on the internet.

And yes they are illegal - they are often taken down

Tickets to professional sporting events have provisions stating you can be ejected for recording the event. While these are basically never enforced, I could see trying to stream the entire game be a good reason for the venue to start enforcing it.

Similarly, the broadcasts of sporting events have a disclaimer saying you can't rebroadcast or retransmit it in any way, but I have no idea if that is legally binding.

The NFL is ahead of the curve here. Their streaming option for me as a non-US person is amazing. It's not cheap (250 Euro iirc) but it's also a ton better than normal games. Since I have no spoilers here as NFL results aren't even reported my usual NFL watching is:

RedZone (simulcast) for the batch of early games on Sunday which is roughly 19h-22h over here. Then watch the remaining Sunday games, including SNF on Monday in their cut down all snaps only version (about 45 minutes each compared to the normal 3.5h) and the MNF game on Tuesday (TNF on Friday or Saturday usually). If need be that can be shifted back a day (Sunday Redzone on Monday etc.)

All games archived and reviewable, All22 perspective is also nice to do some analyzing every now and then. The bundle includes Playoffs and the SB and some other stuff. I usually also watch Hard Knocks before the season for example.

I agree, Game Pass is a /great/ service.

And, their streaming technology is pretty standard (granted, woven through an odd maze of servers) and stable. Because of that, I and a few others were able to write an addon that lets subscribers access it from within Kodi. The lack of interface lock-in is nice.

With a few caveats, GamePass has done it the right way.

It's ironic that here in Germany I get better access to football content than I ever did in the US.

---Alex

This has been said elsewhere but both GamePass and NHL.tv are good unless you want to watch local teams. Which of course is the primary desire of anyone who's a cord cutter (like me). I'm sure they are prohibited from providing local streams by the contracts they have already agreed to. Here is how bad those contracts can apparently be: here in Boston you can listen to NFL games on the radio, but if you try and stream that same radio station over the internet while a game is going on, it's blacked out.

The contract structure is totally unsuited to the internet-using public. Sooner or later the situation will change due to cord cutters. When it does happen, my bet is that the leagues will have to accept an overall decrease in available revenue. Player salaries will descend. The revenue of these enterprises probably peaked a couple of years ago. And like with newspapers, the product will need to change.

I just wanted to say "Thanks!" I'm a happy user of your extension for Kodi. I use it here in the US, and wait until after the 2nd games have ended (~20:00EST) to watch my out-of-market team.

Legacy broadcast contracts are a huge problem here. I only care about hockey, but NHL.tv is a complete mess from an audience perspective.

$120 a year theoretically gets you streaming for the regular season.

Unless you're considered in-market for the team you want to watch, in which case, the games are blacked out for you since they're available on regional sports channels.

So say you live out-of-market from the team you want to watch. Great! Now you can stream all the games live... unless it happens to be broadcast on national TV, in which case you get blacked out.

It's literally impossible to give the league money and watch all the games you want to see without also having cable and it's all because of the tangled mess of agreements with regional cable channels.

I just watch everything on dvr. I've managed to make it most of the NFL season only knowing about 4 total scores. Like I think the bucs beat the hawks last week. And I live in seattle and have a fantasy team.

I watch all of the baseball cardinals games at work. I'm often up to 3 weeks behind. This is easier as I'm out of market. But it's not that hard. I used to unfollow people on twitter who thought tweeting scores was somthing I'd care about. And I stopped using google news because it thinks who died on Game of Thrones or who won a game as news. It's even worse because it sees you looking at articles about them and zeroes in the news for you.

Other than that the only issue is catching back up on baseball. There are so. many. games.

Not in China. We have free HD sport. F1, Premier League, La Liga, NBA and everything. Just download an app on Chinese app store, you are good to go.

Is all the content fully licensed or are they playing fast and loose with international copyright law?

Take a guess.

This is China. We don't give a fuck about licenses

It seems they've got about 90,000,000 subscribers, so 500,000 is only half a percent drop. As the article projects, it'll still be many years before they're disrupted out of business.

The premise of the article is not that a 500,000 drop is significant by itself. It is that ESPN has huge contractual costs to teams/leagues to carry sports over the next several years that cost enough that they need (for example) 85,000,000 subscribers minimum in order to pay their overhead costs.

So it is not a 500,000 loss against 90,000,000 total, it is a 500,000 loss against a buffer of 5,000,000 [1] extra beyond the minimum subscriber point they require to bring in enough money to pay their obligations. 500k against 5M is a 10% reduction in their buffer zone in one month.

There's only two good things that ESPN broadcasts:

* Live Sports * "30 for 30" documentaries

Aside from these it's mostly noise - sports commentary and sports news. Which, not incidentally, are the cheapest forms of programming on the channel. Quality programming will almost always find an audience in the Internet era. ESPN has a lot of low-quality filler that viewers simply don't want to pay for.

I used to watch Sports Center for highlights (now the internet makes sure I don't miss anything noteworthy) and occasionally the talk shows (which now rarely cover inside the lines topics). I think without reliable non-event programming it's hard to justify an entire channel.

Started seeing them doing 'eSports' drops occasionally now... gasp! (I thought their long-form "OJ" documentary was excellent!)

One thing to also take into understanding, for the heavily negotiated games like American football, baseball, and basketball, less revenue from TV contracts will certainly affect future negotiations with their respective player unions. It will be curious when that profitability number is crossed and how the leagues adopt to it. They can only squeeze broadcasters and fans so much.

Perhaps someone could give us non-Americans some insight into how TV works over there.

Whenever I'm visiting relatives, it's just this huge mess on TV. They have the same shows like Big Bang Theory, but it's not clear to me how it's distributed. Some channels seem to be local, while others seem to be planet-wide like CNN. The amount of advertising is insane, I can't watch it. Also there's these low quality local business ads that you never see in Europe.

What's a network, what's cable, what's a blackout, and what does it matter?

Also, what is the impact of free internet video? I can pretty much watch any soccer match I want by googling it during the match, including some quite obscure ones. Could it be that US sports viewers have discovered this as well? In fact the US sports lend themselves to highlights, because they're so incredibly long and full of ads.

I really don't get why you're downvoted.

It seems like an honest question, which, unfortunately, I can't really answer for you.

You order a subscription to various channels via cable, satellite, etc.

Shows are run on a schedule, television sets usually include the ability to set recordings for showings. Most people just set it to record the newest episode of every show they want to watch and catch up their shows that way, deleting watched shows as needed. Unless it's a show they are really interested in and obviously you can tune in to the scheduled showing if you remember the time.

The subscriptions you purchase usually include a set amount of local or regional channels (depending on where you live). You can also pick up local channels via an antenna or similar methods.

It's hard to be a sports fan without cable. They have blackouts on games where channels can't display games based on your region.[0] Or not being able to stream certain games online for a multitude of reasons.

[0]https://support.espn.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/What-is-a-Blacko...

the local channels tend to be affiliates of the biggies like NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox. We tend to refer to that as "Network TV". Bigger cities likely have more variance, but I"m not too familiar.

The local channels sell advertising to local businesses, while also showing ads from the national network.

Blackouts are (i think) specific to sports, and I'm not too familiar with them.

It's funny, because I never realized TV in Europe had those differences (and I watched some of it)

Cable is basically subscription TV (like Virgin Media in the UK and some countries, Canal+ in France, in Germany they have KabelDeutschland, UPC in the Netherlands, SKY via sattelite, etc)

Network is a channel basically (BBC might also be considered a network since it's a collection of channels with the same owner, but you have France 1/2, etc, ARD, ZDF, ProSieben in Germany, SkyNews in the UK)

The difference in the US/Canada (and other countries in the American continent) is that usually you have some local programming (State/Province/City level). So you usually have a local news program dealing with, for example, State News (this also happens in Brazil and some other LATAM countries). And you bet the local low-quality ads happen everywhere (but not necessarily go to the TV)

Regional content is definitely a thing in the UK - with regional ITV franchises and things like BBC Scotland - they do "local" news items in additional to national news and produce local content.

Germany has state-wide TV as well. You can receive it in the whole country, but it's definitely targeted towards citizens of a specific state.

Ah yes, but BBC Alba (Scotland) is a specific channel, not one program that's replaced depending on where you are

Isn't BBC Alba the Gaelic channel?

I think things are different these days with the multitude of channels available on digital but in the old days you definitely did get different content hence the "Except for viewers in Scotland" notice that you'd often see on interesting programs.

Pretty certain the BBC do regional news after the evening news broadcast.

Ah good, so it's pretty similar

Yes, BBC Alba is in (Scottish) Gaelic

Blackouts in Europe don't happen because most right-holders are national.

But basically, a particular sports event shown on one channel will not be broadcasted because another channel holds the rights in that juridiction.

It happens a lot on Sattelite TV in Africa...

TF1, the biggest French Channel is broadcasted on Canal Sat Africa. TF1 shows Formula One events. But they only hold the rights for France.

Since Canal Plus (the channel) or SuperSports (South African Channel) hold the rights for Africa, TF1 is blacked out during Formula One events.

Furthermore, in the US, local channels pay for exclusive rights to broadcast sports events for local teams.

So while your New York-Chicago may be available on MLB or NBA's streaming service, it will be blacked out in Chicago and New York because a TV channel has paid for the exclusive rights.

Actually Black outs happen in Europe.

If I'm not mistaken, all of the Bundesliga games are available for free on Bundesliga's streaming service if watched outside of Germany.

gonna be a ton of bummed out dads and uncles if espn goes belly up.

But happy wives (I know I'm generalizing here)

You think spending time together makes married people happier?

What a bizarre comment. You think spending time apart makes them happier? If so, why are they married?

Because they had kids 20 years ago back when they were young and attractive.

*note that this is a joke, just like (I assume) the post you were replying to.

Because they like spending time together but get tired of it when it's 24/7 for years on end maybe?

Wouldn't be much of a marriage if it didn't.

This is a good thing. The sports themselves don't go away. This just means that the cable sports business model is less viable. Maybe now MNF, the hallowed American institution, will go back to network and be viewable by the rest of us.

Agreed. I see this as the death of the "forced bundle." People who don't care about football are now finding that they don't have to pay for it. They're cutting the cable.

Others can still watch it, mostly OTA, but through some paid options as well.

So only the artificial inflation of revenue due to the forced bundle is going away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com