Posted on 12/07/2015 5:59:19 AM PST by C19fan
Your favorite sports team is massively overvalued right now. It’s not that you ought to be losing sleep over Jerry Jones’s or Mark Cuban’s finances—they were rich before and will be rich after. But the popping and cracking noises emanating from the key support beam in our Temple of Athletics—the TV sports business—foreshadow wild disruptions ahead for the world of sports.
Like the barking dogs that sense an earth tremor before we do, ESPN’s annus horribilis is a harbinger of the Internet’s coming disintermediation of America’s half-trillion dollar sports industry. Just since mid-summer, the Disney-owned 800-pound linebacker of sports TV announced falling subscriber counts and weak ad revenues that led to a devastating media stock price rout. The network has elected to let some of its highest-profile talent go, has announced a round of significant rank-and-file layoffs, and then last month shuttered its prestigious Grantland.com sports journalism site.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
The writing for TV shows, cable and not, has gotten AWFUL. I figure it's because there's so much programming that the writing talent is spread too thin.
I gave up cable a month ago. Truth is, on antenna TV I get some stations that air old TV shows and movies. It's an improvement.
They have come up to speed more of late.
We watch AntennaTV or MeTV whenever we travel. “The Rifleman” always seems to be on. It is like TV Land before TV Land wanted to be too cool for its own good.
Everything’s moving away from “pay-per-X,” because the self-important millenials don’t believe they should pay for entertainment. If anything, it’ll move to Internet-based distribution.
too many thugs and commercials, it’s obvious most owners and players don’t care at all about their team
ESPN and it’s siblings charge a very high freight per viewer to cable providers. Cable providers in return make tiers of channel offerings, with ESPNs in each tier driving the cost up. I got sick of paying a fortune just so I could have the tier with Boomerang, the most expensive tier. I only wanted Boomerang, yet I had to pay for tons of ESPNs and MTVs. Finally, I had enough and cut the cable and went to Netflix. I can order all the cartoons I want, and many are on streaming. The whole Pink Panther series was on a while back. You could say that me and others like me, (and there are many) cut the cable BECAUSE of ESPN.
PPV isn’t going to cover many $200 million contracts for baseball players. Pro football may be able to make it on PPV.
Owners will be pleading poverty in 5-10 years, unless they find new revenue streams on top of their regional/national TV deals.
I don’t have cable, but I never miss a game.
I only watch Golf now that tiger is gone ,everything is sooo green
Of course, before the cable dollars came along, folks were predicting that Major League Baseball had an un-sustainable model.
They do seem to enjoy it.
I love sports and much as anyone and play many different ones but, in all honesty, if the MLB/NFL/NBA, etc stopped playing tomorrow it wouldn’t bother me in the least.
i didn't read past that money shot....there are a few here like that
No. It’s just a change in paths. Most sports are doing fine in attendance and revenue, and even TV ratings. Cable is having an issue, which is pinging the cable networks, but they’re still getting killer ratings, they’re just having issues with the base money stream. Meanwhile the NFL put their first game on just the internet, and it did fine.
A young boy here in the US is more likely to have a poster of Lionel Messi on his wall, then for any football or baseball player.
1) It's tied to an obsolescent distribution model; cable television. Cable in general is losing viewers, primarily because in each region the cable provider is a heavy-handed monopoly. ESPN made the mistake of tying themselves to long-term contracts to buy up the broadcast rights based on projections that the number of cable viewers would increase. Instead, they have decreased. The sports leagues are doing an end-run around ESPN by marketing their own games through NFL Sunday Ticket, MLB At Bat and NHL Gamecenter. Fans find they are better options than paying for cable.
2) ESPN’s non-game PC commentary is not drawing viewers, it is repelling them. Viewers want to watch the game, they don't care for the politically correct talking head shows. While the technology is different, it's the same dynamic that caused me to drop my subscriptions to Sports Illustated in the early 1980s and then The Sporting News in the early 1990s. Obsolescent print media was going increasingly PC, with all of the op-eds and articles having the obligatory “sports as a means of advancing social justice” angle. That is most definitely LAST on the list of reasons to follow sports. In fact, its a reason not to.
So as the leagues bypass ESPN, and the communists there are dogmatically tied to their program of agitation/propaganda, viewers vote with their remotes and they are voting to leave the collective farm.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.