I would like to see an end to bundling on cable TV. That would probably mean the end to ESPN and a few others.
The bundling makes it difficult for me to build a package with any provider that includes what my wife and I want. In order to get that odd channel or two, we keep getting stuck with a bunch of channels we do not want. I currently have DirecTV, but I am thinking of returning to DISH. They have a package called Flex Pack that potentially includes most of the channels my wife and I watch. The downside is that I would lose Root Sports, which is the only way to watch the Astros games (Root is only on Comcast and DirrecTV here in Texas). But, I have simply got to stop paying so much for programming.
My favorite era of programming was the time I had a big C-Band dish. All the programming was a la carte. You could buy a years worth of a channel for a few bucks a year, or add combos of a few channels that were owned by the same company. My yearly programming cost was about what I am now paying monthly. This sort of programming came to an end for me when channels started going digital. The company that serviced and repaired my C-Band switched over to mini-dishes, and I could no longer get the dish repaired. It would have eventually needed upgrading in order to receive the feeds that had gone purely digital.
And there is lies the rub. If ESPN is down over a million subscribers in the last two months, then so is CNN, TBS, FNC, The Food Network and so on as they are all in a basic bundle. Yet you only hear about ESPN’s woes. Now there are about five ESPN channels some which only show up in higher tier Channel packages. So if customers are downgrading to basic cable a few of the minor ESPN channels go away,but I kind of doubt that is what they are calculating. Not sure what I am missing here.