Posted on 07/22/2015 1:00:39 AM PDT by iowamark
Sports-TV powerhouse ESPN, a profit machine that has long towered over the media landscape, is showing signs of stress as the pay-TV industry goes through an unprecedented period of upheaval.
A decline in subscribers as customers trim their cable bills, coupled with rising content costs and increased competition, has ESPN in belt-tightening mode, people familiar with the situation say.
The company, majority owned by Walt Disney Co., has lost 3.2 million subscribers in a little over a year, according to Nielsen data, as people have “cut the cord” by dropping their cable-TV subscriptions or downgraded to cheaper, slimmed-down TV packages devoid of expensive sports channels like ESPN.
At the same time, the prices ESPN pays for the rights to show games are ballooning. Rivals including 21st Century Fox Inc. ’s Fox Sports and Comcast Corp. ’s NBC are aggressively pursuing sports properties to feed their own outlets, which is also driving up prices. (Fox and News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, were part of the same company until 2013.)
Last year, ESPN agreed as part of a renewal deal with the National Basketball Association to triple its average annual fees from $485 million to about $1.47 billion, people familiar with the deal said.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
The Sports media is a white minstrel show, especially ESPN.
No ESPN. Some BBCA, ME-TV and TCM and very rarely much else.
Unfortunately ESPN has the best coverage for Grand Slam tennis matches. You can watch all matches either live or replay on your computer as long as you subscribe to ESPN on tv. The bonus is John McEnroe doesn’t do the commentary on the computer version. The only reason I keep cable is for the tennis because I rarely watch anything on network tv.
Bruce Jenner.
*I refuse to call HIM by any other name, as he simply grew out his hair and tacked on some saline bags to his chest*
Mike Lupia and others bash conservatives and of course the over pay for Sports Programing
uh,, he wasn’t a swimmer.. jest sayin
oh and I completely agree with you he’s always Bruce to me.., with the right makeup and surgery Mean Joe Green could stand up there and look halfway girlish.. Oh crap I just scared myself with that one.. LOL
I did exactly that back in 2001 when my kids were very small. Best move I ever made.
Caitlan Courageous? We don’t know why people are leaving us? LMAO
Shows what I know.
“has lost 3.2 million subscribers in a little over a year”
This works!
Cut your cable tv subscription today!
That explains why they gave faggot Bruce Jenner a very special award for mutilating himself.
I didn’t know Bruce had a dickectomy. I just thought of him as a cross-dresser. He’s a fag, anyway.
Bingo. ESPN at one time, seemed to have a golden goose. A captive audience, exciting programming, decent analysts, etc. Now, they've infused a heaping pile of leftist crap into their product, and it's readily evident. While on a recent vacation, I had a little time to catch a morning production of one of their sports' "panels." I think their regular host was not available, so a black woman hosted. She had another black co-host on her panel, what appeared to be a gay Hispanic, and some metrosexual-looking white guy who was a bit on the quiet side. (No, it was not Mike Greenburg, either.) The first 5-10 minutes of the show was nothing but this black woman blabbering on and on about the NBA, I think, but her monologue was filled with so much street language I could not confirm. Occasionally, her black co-host would agree with her; the gay Hispanic would say something gushing, and the metrosexual white guy would utter a couple-word sentences. I don't know who their target audience was, but it was not me. I turned it off.
To the best of my knowledge, Bruce still has his johnson. He had his face mutilated by a plastic surgeon (to create a more feminine appearance), and had bags of liquid implanted in his chest.
Roger that. Silly me :)
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