So does this reflect a waning interest in sports, or are these subscribers going elsewhere?
Another way to think about it. ESPN, outside commentary and opinion, is really nothing more than a middleman. The leagues can go direct to the consumer and they likely will do this much more in the future.
ESPN cannot go direct to consumer per the contracts. It is required that to consume much of the ESPN content, you need a cable subscription (even to stream on the internet). That is a broken model and is slowly (or quickly?) dying. That's not great for NFL etc but horrible for ESPN. The sports leagues could recover, ESPN likely couldn't.
NFL Sunday Ticket is a DirecTV exclusive unless you can prove you can't get DirecTV at your address then you can stream live games.
You can listen to live audio. You can watch replays of games. In fact, you can watch replays from 22 different camera angles. You can watch condensed replays. You can even watch live preseason games. But you can't watch live games that matter.
I love football, love hockey. Would be MORE than happy to pay a reasonable fee for it, but not $1600/yr. For me they're additionally hampered by the fact that frontier is the worst ISP on the planet and even if I did want to stream games I probably wouldn't be able to do so in any reasonable quality.
Anecdotally, I think people also care less about sports. It used to be everyone at work would talk about various sports, but now roughly half the people could care less.
How is this not a bad thing? I certainly wouldn't want my son or daughter give up as soon as things don't work out. That kind of behavior spills into the rest of life, not just sports.
The changes in schools and helicopter parenting are these causes.
League of Legends, Overwatch, Counter Strike etc etc.
At the time of my comment, Twitch is live broadcasting the Hearthstone World Championship, Duelyst Pro League, Vainglory Evil Eight, Starcraft II World Championship Series Global Finals, and SMITE Pro League.
eSports tournaments have paid out over $100 million in prizes. Some of these tournaments are being carried live on cable channels in other parts of the world where they're more popular.
FIFA is somewhat popular.
Another thing is all sports over represent whites demographically, so if there's a big government immigration program to reduce the white demographic from 90% in the boom days to 60% now and ideally 0% in the distant future, then sports is just going away as an old white man thing. NBA and soccer are the only sports where the fans basically are not old white men. Another decade or two and it won't be a white country therefore not a sports bubble / sports fan country. Just simple demographics, non-whites don't do sports as much as whites.
Woe be upon hockey...