ESPN subscriber losses raise questions about the TV ecosystem | Hacker News Reader

ESPN subscriber losses raise questions about the TV ecosystem

washingtonpost.com

116 pointszonotope152 comments

I need to work and sleep and spend time with friends. TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash.

I can't even spend the attention required to watch TV most times. I find myself just leaving it on in the background and then realized that I've paused it because something was more interesting on my laptop. Sometimes it takes me hours just to get through one episode.

There is also piracy. I don't have cable but I still watched Walking Dead. Which I've also stopped watching. Live TV just seems so pointless. If a show is good I can just pick it up after like 3 seasons and binge it if I want.

Paying $80 a month for TV is just absurd. And paying for sports is even more ridiculous. I like the NBA, and occasionally the NFL during playoffs. But I'll never watch a game live which just spreads 35 minutes of content over 3 hours to maximize ad revenue.

TV had it's heyday, the idea that it isn't on a steady downward decline towards some new steady state is delusion. ESPN in its current form is done. The impact on athletes salaries should be interesting though.

It's possible it's completely unrelated - but I wonder if the constant threats to move teams to different cities if people aren't* willing to fund billion dollar stadiums is related? I know for a lot of casual fans, that's a massive turnoff. You see teams making a ransom in profit year after year, but then they expect the public to fund them above and beyond. The whole thing just feels like it's gotten out of control.

That's completely ignoring what I can only assume will eventually be massive lawsuits around concussions for the NFL.

It's completely anecdotal, but so many of my friends are put off by blacked out games which make random games unavailable to watch. So not only do you spend a ridiculous amount of money for a sports subscription, but you don't even know if you'll even be able to watch your team! And when you do, it's a little bit of sports sprinkled in between tons of in-your-face advertising, with ads in between plays, ads on coach's heads, ads scrolling across the bottom of the screen, ads interrupting normal play, etc. It's ridiculous. And it's even more ridiculous that media companies are surprised.

Out of curiosity (having never watched sports), what causes these blackouts? Is it contacts with the service providers?

2015 and 2015 they suspended having blackouts. The NFL will re-evaluate the rule after going through the season. The blackout policy was instituted in the early 1970s when NFL teams relied primarily on ticket sales to generate revenue. The rule stated that if a game wasn't sold out 72 hours prior to kickoff, they would be blacked out in the local TV markets. It sucked. If your favorite team was bad that year, you ended up being blacked out as no one attended the game. Sure I was a fan of the Dolphins, but I am not going to spend $100+ to watch a 1-16 or 6-10 team some years. I would watch at home in the background.

>but so many of my friends are put off by blacked out games which make random games unavailable to watch.

It isn't random; it's an outdated approach to getting butts in seats. Generally, it will be the local team that is "blacked out" in its home market. The blame goes to the team ownership, not the networks. But I agree, it's stupid.

I definitely think we are at peak NFL. The head trauma is a big issue, but not because of lawsuits. The NFL has plenty of money and can pay whatever. The real problem is 10-20 years from now when parents have kept their kids out of football because of the head issue, and now you have the best athletes in other sports instead.

The NFL has also oversaturated the brand. It used to be Sunday games and then MNF. Each week was an event. TNF ruined the event aspect, and has put on really terrible games showing how thin the league has become. Then there are the games in other countries. For a sport like baseball or basketball 1 game in another country is not a big deal, but the NFL season is only 16 games and losing a home game is a huge deal for the fans, players, and competition aspect.

So yeah, I think all those things (and the stadium issue you mention) have added to up to pushing fans away.

The head trauma is what made me stop watching football. I used to watch 8 hours of football every Sunday (on Red Zone). At some point this off season, I began to think about what I was really watching. I also got the sense that the NFL was taking the fans for granted. The major rule changes every year really bugged me, especially when nothing was done (except trying to reduce the amount of returned kickoffs) to alleviate the concussion issue.

At some point I just felt like I didn't want to watch old dudes "own" young men while they tried to kill each other for America's entertainment. It started to feel like real life mandingo fighting (from Django Unchained) and I decided that I didn't want to be a part of enriching that.

Same with me. I'm disgusted that they did not do much about had trauma. I'm also disgusted that it is so difficult for me to watch games I want without paying a lot of money, even when they are in the past. A third think I'm disgusted with is that some of my favorite players will have a few bad games and then get cut from the team.

What could they do to alleviate head trauma without essentially neutering the game?

Get rid of most of the padding and headgear so the players don't feel like they have the ability to take such hard hits--because as far as their brains go, they don't have that ability.

I wonder what the game would look like if these changes were made. Would it become more like rugby, but with forward passing?

Head trauma is also becoming a big deal in rugby union now. It won't be long, in my opinion, before wearing of the padded scull cap headgear becomes mandatory.

I played the game in a serious social manner (every weekend during the season at a reasonably good amateur level) for 15-20 years (had a few seasons off to do other things) since I was 15. I've had an ACL reconstruction and one shoulder is a painful mess. Fortunately no obvious head issues so far.

I love the game and watch a lot of it, but when the time comes I'm not really sure I want my boy playing.

wearing of the padded scull cap headgear becomes mandatory.

Thanks for the personal perspective. Do you think this would lead to the same situation the NFL finds itself in now? People hitting harder in part because of the protection provided by the pads?

I don't follow NFL, but from what I do know the games are quite different which may result in different injury ratios.

In rugby, only the ball carrier may be tackled and there are rules against deliberate head high hits. Yet, with the speed, size and athleticism of moden players, the amount of head injuries are on the rise.

I think wearing the padded scull caps would make a big difference to accidental head trauma in rugby. Many of the top players already do.

Just convert over to sevens. It's more interesting per play, and if the matchup is a dud, golly you've just lost maybe 20 minutes.

3-4 hours for NFL? Ick. Only the best, most interesting games maybe approach that sort of time and commercial (aggravation) commitment. And that's setting aside head injuries.

IDK, can someone comment on how helmets have evolved recently?

I used to compete in and still watch a lot of downhill skiing. The technological advancements in helmets over the past ten years has been incredible, now we have MIPS foam and kevlar and carbon and in general stuff that's been engineered and crash tested to perfection. Not to mention helmets are now discarded after a single impact. How is it with NFL helmets?

It isn't the helmet that's the problem. As their ability to absorb shock has increased, the players hitting harder has gone up with it. And although a helmet can absorb a lot of shock, the twisting/turning of the head on impact is not something they can dampen, and those are the motions that cause brain trauma.

Keep in mind that the interior base of the braincase is a catastrophe of sharp bone, and that you're scraping something with the durability of jello across it every time there's an impact that has any lateral component, which is all of them.

Arm the quarterbacks with a 2 shot .22 derringer.

You get the strategy of knowing how many shots the QB has taken in the game, all sorts of new statistics can be compiled for the fans who like that, and you're more or less guaranteed to have one to four serious injuries per game.

The QB now has to figure out defensive and offensive aiming as well as ball management. Tackles and backers need to factor in taking a shot versus possible possession.

Not to mention that QBs get arrested during most games. There's going to be a lot more substitution.

Really, if you're going to talk about "neutering" the game by making it less dangerous to the players, then obviously it makes the game much more manly if you up the stakes this way.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=1488

We are definitely peak NFL for several reasons: 1. Head trauma. People watching now actively know about it and it turns some people off. Those who don't care about players getting injured, then gripe the game is being changed. So the NFL is caught in the middle of losing fans for putting out a rather barbaric sport of causing head trauma against those who think they are making the game worse. 2. Stadiums. Owners simply were greedy and pushed to far. This turned off various fans and groups. 3. Kids. A lot of parents don't want their kids playing. So that will have an impact not on the player pool, but those who will watch and live the sport later. 4. Time. Games are way to long. It's 3+ hours for 10 minutes of action. Seriously, Comcast edits all games and you can watch them a few days later. They take 8 to 10 minutes to watch all plays. You lose the anticipation, but still too many timeouts and stoppages. 5. Watching patterns. Many people, escpecially those under 30, don't watch tv for 3 hours in a row. They are doing multiple things. They want bite size content. NFL simply does not fit into that currently, unless you have the red zone package. That is the only way I can watch football now, unless my home team is playing (Dolphins). Even for the I watch flip back and forth and do other things. 6. Costs. It is ridiculously priced to go to a real game. Parking is $25 to $40. Tickets are $100 each for decent seats. Food is 4x what is actually costs. Just crazy. Plus I don't have a full day to kill, to drive, park, wait, and watch the game. Easier to turn on at home. Unless it's a big game or playoffs, live NFL is not worth it at all.

Also with fewer and fewer children getting hooked the NFL week continue to delayed.

Their marketing campaign was to go after children like the tobacco industry.[1] With head trauma coming to the forefront the NFL is going to the back of priorities.

[1] http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/nfl-football-...

Huff is not really a credible source

Sacramento just got a $$$ stadium. City used it as an excuse to significantly jack up the parking prices, $28 for an evening to pay for the stadium. Of course now the restaurants are seeing a drop in business because not many want to pay $28 to park.

Spending so much on stadiums seems insane. In Pittsburgh the Steelers and Pirates lobbied for and got seperate stadiums, despite minimal overlap in seasons.

IIRC, Pittsburgh voted down the stadium several times, but then they pulled some political shenanigans to shove it through.

The problem isn't that the Steelers and Pirates should have separate stadiums. That's fine. The problem is that the stadiums should pay for themselves.

If a stadium isn't a good enough business proposition to get funded privately, it shouldn't get funded, period.

> If a stadium isn't a good enough business proposition to get funded privately, it shouldn't get funded, period.

Yeah. In Munich, for example, the Allianz Arena stadium was built for 340M €, which were brought up by FC Bayern and TSV 1860, in cooperation with Allianz insurance which sponsored the name. FC Bayern paid off the entire debt two years ago (after 9.5 years, it was projected to take 25 years to pay off the debt).

But I'm not totally against public partial funding/investment - especially in the lower leagues the pitch usually is open to all kinds of sport clubs as well as nearby schools, so it makes sense to fund at least part of the costs via public channels as long as the public gets some value back beyond interest payments. (Anecdata: I'm living across the pitch my former school still uses. It's weird to see lots of the teachers random on the street...)

Sacramento has a ton of city owned parking garages near the new arena which are typically empty in the evening. The city contributed $212 million to the arena based on future increased parking revenue generated from events at the arena.

I've been to several events this year at the Golden1 Center and have spent no more than $10 on parking for the evening. The city did use this as an excuse to increase meter rates and extend hours, but it's only $0.50/hr more.

Right on all points. You touched on it with your laptop comment, but there are also so many other avenues for couch entertainment. There are traditional shows on services like Netflix, but then there is also Twitch, YouTube, etc... that have compelling background content with little to no commercials.

Speaking of commercials, this is what is really killing TV. We have more things competing for our time than ever before, and commercials are the first thing to go. In addition to the time wasting, people also start doing the math. $10/month for Netflix commercial free content or cable $80-$100/month for commercial laden content.

BTW, AMC and TWD are one of the worst offenders with commercial time vs. show time.

You said something very important here, commercials are really a no-go. I pay $10/mo not to see them on youtube and especially not to be seen by my kids. Just requests for stupid toys are worth $10.

I saw that Star Wars: The Force Awakens was on cable TV the other day while flipping through the guide. I almost clicked on it, but then I saw the run time - 3h40m. It is a 2h15m movie. There is no way I'm sitting through that many commercials.

>There are traditional shows on services like Netflix, but then there is also Twitch, YouTube, etc.

This article is about ESPN, which is a live sports network. Cutting the cord is difficult for a sports fan. None of the services you mention are a replacement (yet).

>TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash.

>TV had it's heyday

I can tell you don't watch much TV. It's never been better. We're in a golden age of TV, it's just not on ESPN. There have recently been a lot of extremely high quality, hour long dramas, which basically amount to a movie every week. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Wire, arguably Westworld, to name a few.

All of those programs are available on demand on the internet. When people talk about TV in this context they are talking about cable not the content.

The parent comment was discussing the quality of the content.

True. And it's easier to watch these on the internet (legally or illegally) than on "TV".

Whether you watch it on TV or pay HBO (or Netflix or whoever) to stream it they're still TV shows, produced by TV networks. It's the format, not the delivery that matters. The parent comment was obviously about the quality of the content. Nobody cares whether it comes over coax or TCP.

The presence or absence of commercials is a huge element in the "format". It's possible to never see commercials online -- which isn't possible on TV. Also, Shows of this quality are the vast minority, not the "vast majority".

>Shows of this quality are the vast minority, not the "vast majority".

There are higher quality TV shows than ever before. To say TV "had its heyday" is outrageous. TV, not movies, is where the magic is happening these days.

I know people who have paid for HBO accounts to watch shows as soon as they come out (instead of pirating them or binging them a few years later), ditto for cable subs and commercials. The average consumer is not bothered by this stuff IME.

The on demand nature of modern TV show delivery has allowed for a huge shift to serialized storytelling. Previously, there was a real drive for standalone episodes as there was significant money to be made by syndicating shows post their original air date. And, of course the conventional wisdom of "if someone misses an episode they'll quit watching".

Those are great, but those are all HBO, if I recall, which is decidedly not TV in my opinion (I have HBO Now).

You'd be hard pressed to find something on live cable television that isn't trash or available somewhere else without obnoxious ads (loudness mitigation is a lie) and cheaper.

>those are all HBO

>You'd be hard pressed to find something on live cable television that isn't trash

Breaking Bad and Mad Men were both on AMC.

Ah, my mistake. I could have sworn I saw them listed on HBO.

While this might disprove my statement, I don't think it's entirely without merit, still.

Well, I think Breaking Bad is also on Netflix.

If you're picking up Breaking Bad right now, you'd watch it on Netflix. The only reason you'd watch it on TV is if you're catching it the first time it's airing. I only joined on the last season so I don't have much context, but everyone I knew in college would wait for it to air and immediately torrent the commercial-free episode. For something huge like the ending I know some people that hosted small viewing parties to watch it live, but many were fine with waiting.

Also, Breaking Bad ended in 2013, and Mad Men in 2015. That list only has two entries. Maybe not literally everything on live cable TV is trash, but I think it highlights that there's a clear decline.

The obvious example is The Americans, and... nothing else comes to mind. Everything else worth watching is created by Netflix or HBO (or maybe Amazon).

I have a hard time agreeing that these new series fall under the category of Television. TV _is_ explicitly the format in which the content is delivered (device and delivery). It used to be broadcast live, whether over the air or by cable, and those formats required payment for said delivery.

Now actual televisions aren't necessarily part of the equation. Plenty of people are watching these series on their phones and laptops and tablets, and sometimes televisions, but not in the way they used to be delivered to said screens.

I agree that we're in something of a golden age for episodic story-telling. I agree that this story-telling was born from broadcast television. I don't agree that it, in its current incantation, can be plainly categorized as "TV".

In the same way that a mobile device is no longer a telephone, though we may still call it one from time to time, and a TV remote is no longer a "clicker", no matter how many times my parents call it one.

Names of formats have a way of sticking around. The novel hasn't been new for a long time. Films are distributed with disks, and solid state disk drives have neither disks nor drives.

Language moves on. We already have a retronym[1] called "broadcast television" that incorporates what you're describing, while the definition of television will probably change with our devices.

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

While I've been a huge fan of this 'golden age of TV', I can't help but wonder to which degree I'm fooling myself by spending hours on 'extremely high quality' television that ultimately still is primarily entertainment and doesn't 'improve' my life in any real way.

The Wire felt like it actually taught me something and made me think about society and my role in it. But to what extent are Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and Westworld basically same as daytime soap operas dressed up so they're palatable to 'discerning' consumers?

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I do find that many people, myself included, justify their TV habits by arguing that we're watching 'quality' TV instead of the usual daytime garbage.

(I've been reading Infinite Jest and recently read Wallace' "E Unibus Pluram"[1], so this has been on my mind.)

[1]: https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

Does something have to have a pecuniary reward to be worthwhile? Stories have been told since the beginning of humanity, and I'm sorry if you see them as a waste of time.

>> "ultimately still is primarily entertainment and doesn't 'improve' my life in any real way."

How is entertaining you not improving your life?

I love getting junk food every once in a while. It 'improves' my life because I enjoy it. Eating a lot of it regularly would not.

I'm not judging anyone and I'm by no means saying that it's easy to discern how 'junk' a form of entertainment is. I'm just saying that I started wondering whether this quality food I'm having a lot of might just be cleverly dressed up junk food. Specifically in regards to 'quality' shows like GoT and Westworld.

I really don't mean that in a pretentious way. I watch stuff that most people would probably consider junk, so that would be hypocritical of me.

A long time ago I came to the conclusion :

One day I will be old and unoccupied, work will be behind me, my capacity to produce will be reduced, I will be more inclined to consume. If TV programmes and films of today are any good they will still be around. I shall watch them then.

You know, this is exactly what my Dad did. He's in his late 80's now, and retired back in '92. He job kept him busy 24/7 for most of his career, and he never had the time to watch TV, when there were so many other, more important things to do.

Nowadays, he uses my Netflix account waaaay more than I do. And he's catching up on decades of shows, and quite enjoying himself. He just finished Season 3 of ST:TNG. It's been fun talking to him about episodes I watched back in the day, too.

Many soaps could probably be radio programs. They're visually simple and the stories are told in a straightforward way. Ditto for many sitcoms, which I generally enjoy, so this isn't as harsh an indictment as it sounds.

TV and movies are visual mediums, you can tell stories in more interesting ways. People might flatter themselves a little bit but that's not why these shows are popular IMHO.

Of those five you listed, three are no longer running.

Yeah, over the past 10 years or so I've swtiched entirely to DVD sets and on-demand streaming. It's not about lowering the bill, it's that the only real edge TV had -- the only reason to put up with all the ads and scheduling bullshit -- was the size of the library. Now that TV-on-DVD and Hulu have gotten big, that's not a problem anymore.

>And paying for sports is even more ridiculous.

Is it a problem that some of us like sports? I bet you have a "ridiculous" hobby or two that's a complete waste of money.

And I love the mentality of "TV is trash and I can hardly stand it...but I'll steal it anyway."

It's more like TV is a barrel of excrement, with few shiny diamonds floating somewhere in there. You can dig through the excrement to get at them, but then there's this Bay of Pirates nearby, and they give away those same diamonds without fecal matter...

Business publications and their core audience only understand business culture and jargon. So business articles about ESPN focus on historical revenue numbers, and talk about corporate spin-off as a means of "unlocking value", etc.

Technical publications and forums like this are largely populated by young people and early adopters (i.e. the groups most likely to be cord-cutting anyway), and tend not to be sports fans. So these discussions marvel at the fact that there are still dinosaurs who haven't cord-cut yet, and suggest that the remedy is ESPN accelerating migration to a new technical platform.

As someone who actually is an avid sports fan, and socializes with other sports fans, I'm going to throw out a third factor for your consideration. The... product... SUCKS... now! It never gets mentioned, because the "business" audience and the "technical" audience doesn't directly experience it so much. However, applying Occam's Razor, I think changes to product quality are usually the largest factor in changes to product fortunes.

ESPN has been on a long, slow shift from "hard" sports coverage to "soft" entertainment filler for years. However, over the past two years this trend has jolted toward accelerating at a breathtaking pace. For the core audience of sports fans, ESPN is basically little more than TMZ now. It's more discussion of off-field "drama" than actual sport.

Sports fans get tired of fake "QB controversies", manufactured by ESPN talking heads. They get tired of endless analysis of whether African-American franchise athletes like RGIII and Russell Wilson are "black enough". Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem was a legit story for the first week or two, but after 14 straight weeks of talk (none of which touched the underlying substance that Kaepernick is trying to call attention to)... I think sports fans of all political persuasion are long past done hearing about it.

TL;DR - ESPN is a sports network. It has dramatically shifted away from serious sports coverage over the past two years. Their core audience is growing sour on them, and subscriptions are dropping. I believe that everything beyond this is just ancillary factors.

@StevePerkins 2020

You're spot on. I'm old enough to remember Sports Center when it was Patrick and Olberman. It was smart and witty and done with subtlety and clever cultural references. Now ESPN is 90℅ loudmouth morons yelling at each other about the manufactured controversy of the week. Anything other than the live events is unwatchable.

It's just following what traditional news, CNN and the like are doing...

I second this wholeheartedly. I used to watch SportsCenter at night before going to bed and in the morning when I was getting ready all the way back in high school (97-01).

I don't even watch it for more than 10 minutes a week now. I've gotten the EXACT highlight I wanted without waiting on a bunch of crap already online, and the rest of it is just the sports equivalent of political punditry. Just throwing around 'hot takes' for the sake of having something to say.

For every highlight package there's like 3 sob story human interest pieces that are so contrived (the swim team was only LOWER MIDDLE CLASS and they sold hay bales to make it to the state tournament!) that I just get pissed and turn it off.

Let's not even talk about how many commercials are in the middle of their sports broadcasts.

ESPN and SC in particular were where you went for the best of the day in a tight, smart package. You had just enough 'funnies' that something as inane as a Scott Stuart 'Booya!' stood out, and the human interest pieces were actually interesting tales of genuine grit and empathy.

I was barely a watcher anymore by the time all the Tim Tebow is Jesus stuff came out, but that probably pretty much soured me forever.

I don't read the articles, I don't watch the shows, but I do feel that (generally) their prime sports broadcasts are top notch and everything they do has a better quality level than FS1.

EDIT: A question, since I'd imagine the VAST MAJORITY of ESPN's subscribers come from cable package bundling, doesn't it stand to reason that as long as ESPNs decline isn't in stark contrasts to cable/satellite subscriptions that it's more of a condemnation of the entire ecosystem?

I, BTW, would absolutely cut the cord except for I love sports, pretty much all the major US sports. I have kids so going to the bar or a friend's place to watch the game doesn't always pan out, and sometimes if it's a game I'm hugely interested in I would rather be at MY house, on MY couch, watching MY TV and not being interrupted (any more than what 3 kids under 4 can do). Other times I want the game on in the background while I'm getting stuff done around the house.

Likely because buying the rights to broadcast sports is expensive, free-associating talking heads are cheap, and subscriber revenue is down.

It's a vicious cycle.

I'm sure they are well aware that they're behind on the transition to streaming but are stuck with long term existing contracts that don't give them the rights they need.

The leagues want to go direct when they go streaming. Why would they need ESPN as an aggregator?

It's not like Netflix or HBO where you turn it on to browse, you're there to watch a specific game.

They're really screwed.

Entertainment Sports Programming Network.

I cut cable tv 5 years ago after being a heavy user my whole life. The strangest part was transitioning from watching what was on to choosing what to watch. At first I thought it would be obviously better but it was uncomfortable for a while. After a few months the benefits kicked in and now if I'm ever somewhere with other people watching tv there are a few things that stand out:

Commercials are incredibly intrusive. I am amazed at what I was willing to put up with for so long.

Sports commentary is offensively vapid. Actual comment from the Olympic coverage this last year: "This routine is so difficult it's been called incredibly difficult". Even allowing for getting a little tongue tied on live tv it was painfully bad.

Most other commentary is awful. Listening to explanations filtered through what a reporter is willing to take the time to understand just doesn't compare when are so many good sources from real experts in so many fields online.

Maybe I'm just to the point where I want to yell at kids to stay off my lawn but I don't see how the "TV ecosystem" survives much longer.

Def some physiology behind that. If some random movie is on TV it's like "oh cool this is on," if that same movie is available on demand to watch whenever I want it's "seen it, don't need to watch again."

That and I'm paranoid about everything I watch being tracked and used to profile me.

I definitely agree that I'm more willing to watch something that happens to be on, but might not watch the same thing on Netflix (same with the radio and Spotify). Is there any scientific research that proves these thoughts?

People value potential losses more than potential gains. Loosing $10 will affect you more intensely than finding it (or at least you judge it to be before the fact).

So when something is on, there is a "loss" in missing it. When it's on Netflix, there is only a "gain".

The problem with ESPN isn't that it's losing subscribers. The problem is that it's losing subscribers while it's tied into incredibly expensive exclusivity contracts with sports leagues, like Major League Baseball or the National Football League. These contracts form the vast majority of ESPN's expenses and give it the vast majority of its content. This means that, unlike other companies, or even other media companies, it's not clear how ESPN can easily and quickly cut costs to match its declining revenue.

Trying to save money is a loser's game in ESPN's business, and in many others too--imagine telling Blockbuster Video to keep the business going by securing cheaper leases. ESPN needs to break its addiction to high cable TV royalties and give people the sports content the way they want to view it, and stop chasing the ridiculous celebrity angle, personal gossip, hashtags, etc.

I've never understood this argument. Contracts are a two-way street; why should the NFL demand ever-increasing fees for a product that's being watched by fewer and fewer people? Network rating have been down for years, it's only recently that ESPN has been following the same trend. At some point the sports leagues will have to realize that declining viewership means smaller contracts, it's just a question of whether ESPN can survive until that day.

>I've never understood this argument. Contracts are a two-way street; why should the NFL demand ever-increasing fees for a product that's being watched by fewer and fewer people?

Exactly. As bad as this is for ESPN, it's even worse for the NFL. Ticket prices cannot sustain the league. Merchandising cannot sustain the league. The only thing that can sustain a league as rich as the NFL is massive television royalties. I predict that the next few years are going to be very uncomfortable, as the NFL and TV networks have some very tense negotiations over how much the product (football games) is actually worth.

Those $100-330m college stadiums are going to look pretty stupid with 20k people in an 80k stadium too, if RL audiences shrink the same way.

http://www.therichest.com/luxury/most-expensive/college-foot...

Eh, attending a football game and watching one on TV are two different things. My wife would never watch NASCAR on TV, but she loves going to races. She'd never watch football on TV, but she loves tailgating and sitting in the stadium. She absolutely hates baseball, but we're season ticket holders for our local minor league team.

On every comment thread about ESPN's subscriber losses, I see comments like these, which are attached to this Post story:

"I stopped watching both ESPN and the NFL because of their liberal politics."

"What a shock.ESPN pushes it's liberal agenda at every turn alienating half your audience and are suprised subscribers are canceling in droves."

"Way more than half. Most ESPN viewers are/were male. You'd expect common sense to prevail at some point and lead them to restrain themselves from committing ratings suicide, but leftists just can't seem to help it."

"ESPN has driven millions of viewers and subscribers away because of their incessant shoving of their leftist politics in our faces. Whenever I want to watch a game on ESPN, I'm instead subjected to lectures about gay "marriage," Castro, alleged "police brutality," and Bruce Jenner's constitutional right to shower with other people's teenage daughters. ESPN can now be easily mistaken for a rerun of the Democratic National Convention, why bother to watch it?"

"Amazing, not one single word about what is by far the biggest reason for ESPN's current demise. It has become PMSNBC. Every talking head, show host, etc. knows that if they do not toe the Liberal fascist party line, they will be Schillinged."

"ESPN has become a liberal voice in politics. I no longer listen but on watch sports. It has failed its mission."

The conservative half of our country is not happy with ESPN.

I don't think the kind of person that says things like that are cord cutters (which you have to be to stop subscribing to ESPN). These are just run of the mill assholes trying to make a point. The real reason ESPN is losing people is young people just aren't signing up for cable anymore.

EDIT: I should point out that WaPo is pretty much a magnet for right-wing trolling b/c of election and being Bezos-owned. Incendiary comments from the right are par for the course on every WaPo article.

Michael Jordan once said that the reason he doesn't talk about politics is that Republicans buy sneakers too.

He seems to have changed his mind in recent years:

http://theundefeated.com/features/michael-jordan-i-can-no-lo...

He never actually said it. A myth.

I agree that people won't cord cut over this issue. Cord cutting is about saving $1000/year and still being able to get 90% of the content online.

Still, I don't see how it does ESPN any good to be so liberal. The powers that be at the network must see this criticism in every story and consider the option of becoming less political. I expect this to happen in 2017.

What political stances have they taken?

AFAICT, the way these sorts of internet conservatives see it is if you don't spend the majority of your time complaining about Obamacare, claiming climate change is a hoax, and calling for the end of all government regulations, you're a heavily biased far-left liberal socialist.

http://www.espn.com/blog/ombudsman/post/_/id/767/inside-and-...

ESPN's own public editor stated that the company has alienated consumers with its move to the left.

Is it just me, or does it feel like "conservatives" have finally discovered the internet? Over the last few months, it feels like friggin everything has become Obama's fault, or suddenly "leftists" are responsible for X.

I'm not trying to be combative, or start a political argument. I have my own political leanings, sure, but I derive no joy from bitching about it on the internet. I just know that everything I read on a daily basis has veered to the right in the last few months.

Is this a cultural shift, or a demographic that was relatively unheard in this medium asserting itself for the first time? I'm not making a value judgement either way, just wondering.

(Don't get me wrong, shit like Conservapedia has been around for years now. But most of the stuff I read, for better or worse, has been pro-social justice, pro-multiculturalism, etc. until now. Do fewer people buy into that nowadays? Or is what I'm seeing the result of more people participating?)

DT's "victory" has encouraged a lot of folks to feel like they can speak their mind freely. For many, the "victory" is a symbol. It says "you are not alone." It's not that there's any more of them than there were last year; now they feel like they're on the right side of things and are feeling confident.

In hindsight, I observed the same thing with Obama's two terms. A lot of talk about rape culture, safe spaces, etc. Everyone who didn't agree was out of step with where America was really going and was gonna be left behind. So they thought...

That side felt really emboldened and overplayed their cultural hands. Now it's the right's turn to over estimate how much everyone agrees with them.

It's almost certainly multi-faceted, but I don't think it's just "conservatives discovering the internet," or at least anymore than it was 4 years ago.

Two things that I think contribute heavily to the phenomenon you're seeing:

1) We've had 8 years of a democratic president. People were similarly fed up with conservatism at the end of GWB's presidency. If things haven't been going well for you for the past 8 years (and for most Americans, they haven't been going great), it's easy and common to blame the president for those troubles. And by extension, the president's party and theoretical political ideologies.

It's much easier to have strong feelings after such a long time with one political party in charge (theoretically).

2) I'd wager a large sum that most of those comments come from white males who earn at or less than the median income, who previously may not have felt that strong of a political ideology or at least not enough to comment on an internet forum.

Much of the current liberal discourse in America is focused around historically oppressed groups, e.g. black Americans, or people who don't fit into classic gender identities. This comes at the expense of ignoring (or in some extreme instances, trivializing) the struggles of the working class or middle class who may not necessarily fall into one of those historically oppressed groups.

I think it's easy to imagine that if you're a white, poor male you might not feel like American liberalism in its current state really cares about you or your problems. Not that I think Republicans really care about their problems either, but at least they pay them lip service.

Remember where conservatives tend to live. Getting anything better than a 28.8 kilobit/second modem isn't easy. Eh, for you city folk, that's a 0.0288 megabit connection. The decimal point is 3 or 4 places to the bad side of what you are used to getting.

As tolerable internet makes it's way out to rural America, you can expect to see a change in the average political view on the internet.

ESPN is cable, right? Don't most (if not all) cable providers have internet packages? If that's the case, anyone who's getting EPSN is surely has access to connectivity greater than 28.8 kbps.

In the late 90s I lived in a little town (though it was the biggest in the area) in Oklahoma. They had cable internet there before many other areas, due to the simpler infrastructure.

Your view is accurate. As of 10 years ago.

I think if you chose a random red state area, you would find that they have high speed Internet access there.

For instance Atlanta Georgia has a huge concentration of datacenters, went heavily for Trump, and there is high speed Internet all over the state.

Georgia went nominally Trump. Atlanta, Savannah, and smaller cities are still predominantly blue.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/georgia

I've found that most comment sections in so-called MSM is filled with conservative flames, and has been for years.

I've also found that the sources as a developer I (and I suspect you as well) find the most interested seem to be heavily liberal. In such environment I see a ton of what I'd call "SJW bullies" - even hinting at a thought that violates the groupthink there quickly devolves.

In that environment, what has changed? Are conservatives becoming thicker skinned? Is "me too" SJWism being replaced with a more mature version of online liberalism? In any event, I think conservatives are speaking up more in those environments.

The mystery to me is why sites like the Washington Post have a comments section at all. Think of the time and money they spent implementing and running it, possibly requiring the most technical effort out of their entire publishing endeavor.

All to get tons of horrible garbage dumped at the bottom of their pages every minute of the day.

Tons of high traffic sites have these wild west zones at the bottom of their otherwise tightly controlled articles. They have next to no oversight, there are barely any technical barriers to prevent abuse, and yet they still command a significant portion of the main content's reach.

This is absolutely not lost on people who want to promote certain views loudly, quickly and cheaply. I really doubt that all (or even most) of the comments on a site like the Washington Post's are actual people who actually think those things.

But somebody does, and some people will start to find those views more acceptable when they see them everywhere at once.

I figure for most of them it came with their CMS anyway or it was sold as "just add this piece of JS" to increase engagement by some 3rd party. People sign up with their mail in a fit of "someones wrong on the internet" and you can effortlessly spam them.

Having a comment section feels right on the internet, particularly for sites that religiously avoid using any sort of links, at all.

NPR ditched comments this year for the very reasons you cite.

Nice. Now to uncomment the rest of the Internet!

Sounds like somebody just figured out that most of the people inside the helmets and pads are black.

A comment like this takes us even further away from civil, substantive discussion. The guidelines ask us not to do this:

> Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think it's fantastic that some companies use their platforms to help the disadvantaged—it's a good use of their resources, in my opinion.

Sometimes platforms and politics don't mix, though. I don't watch ESPN because I want to hear about politics, I watch it because I want to veg out and hear about sports.

Even if I agree with their politics it becomes grating to hear about it 24/7.

As someone without cable what liberal agenda is ESPN pushing? I haven't watched in years. What politics do they cover?

A lot of athletes are black. They are becoming more vocal about the racism and brutality in this nation. This is causing a lot of white conservatives to feel uncomfortable. Who'd rather they shut up and continue to crush in each other's skulls.

NFL is a joke. It has more ads than any other sports in this world.

Which is why I love RedZone :-)

I don't think internet comments are a useful survey of opinions.

Good, now we have one internet data point about that.

The conservative half of our country is not happy with ESPN.

It's not only conservatives, there are more people who want sports prioritized over social politics.

But it is only conservatives voicing specific comments like that. Because they don't have to risk looking like a heretic. If someone has preexisting allegiance to the social positions the coverage framing is aligned with, it's more complicated for them to dissent. Or they might even feel compelled to watch by the fraudulent implecation that ESPN's editorial decisions are made on importance, not that human interest stories are cheaper and easier to produce and can stir up a segment of the audience.

It's funny - my couch potato father just retired 3 weeks ago.

After 10 years of trying, I had totally given up teaching him to watch YouTube or Netflix.

When I called him a few nights back and asked him what he did that day, he told me he spent all day watching YouTube.

Made me wonder how many other baby boomers might do this once retirement gives them more energy to try new things ...

I wonder if there's a case to introduce Boomers to The AV Club "Wiki Wormhole"[1] series to show the internet isn't all memes and cats and uh, things we don't want to show them they can find for themselves if they really want...

[1] http://www.avclub.com/features/wiki-wormhole/

Macroeconomically, this is good. Between stadiums and college sports and the Super Bowl we, as Americans, place too much value on sports and direct too much economic (and political) power to its mechanisms. Do not underestimate the power of shifting cultural sands.

There was a great article a few years ago, in the New Yorker [1]. It compared Michael Vick, the exploiter of dogs' eagerness-to-please for profit, with Michael Vick, the football player trying to break out of a low socioeconomic bracket by concussing himself for our enjoyment. It was substitled "how different are dogfighting and football?"

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/19/offensive-play

Why are you sure that this signifies a shifting of cultural capital to more civically and educationally worthwhile pursuits?

> Why are you sure that this signifies a shifting of cultural capital to more civically and educationally worthwhile pursuits?

The logic behind a carbon tax is it dissuades destructive behaviour. Implicit is that investors will choose better options.

That is not because every carbon-tax redirected dollar will bear angels. It's just that burning coal is just so bad for us, almost anything else will be a step up. (Don't mean to make this partisan; feel free to substitute cigarette taxes or gun restrictions for a carbon tax.)

Concussing (mostly) poor teenagers hoping for a short shot at the big life followed by guarantees neurological degradation is gladiatoresque in its macabre.

As a person with an insurance background, I think Malcom Gladwell put a good theory forward - eventually insurance won't underwrite football due to the violence. Schools won't have it at younger ages (brain issues), High Schools might save the money (other sports), and then the pipeline to the NFL gets a lot smaller. The quality of 'on the field' product would suffer. The empire contracts, life moves on. It's not necessarily that the cultural capital will go to worthwhile things, it's simply the removal of engaging in a perceived negative.

TV is where music was in the early 2000's. Technology, and streaming in particular, has advanced to such an extent that it's a no brainer. Like music executives were, TV producers are archaic and they've presided over its demise because they have had a monopoly which was so good for so long. They've accepted the way things are as the way they will always be without cognition of the change they were witnessing.

TV is dying because you have to pay more money to have no control over the schedule of things you watch, in comparison to streaming.

In the UK, for sports at least, it is even worse. Up to £90/$120 a month for the full TV package yet I can't even watch the soccer game I want to watch it's picked for me, it's absurd. Yet I can go online and watch an international stream of the same game for free.

Spotify emerged and changed the paradigm, the same will happen to TV but with one critical evolution; the extinction of garbage television.

Programming outside of live television is dead, it makes no sense to persist. The film and TV series market have been sewn up. The greed of sporting government/TV corporation has prevented this so far with Live TV but they'll fall or face the same problem the music industry did, which they already are.

The death of satellite Television is the first step to a better, economically efficient, world for consumers.

If you follow the natural path, advertisement on Satellite television may be the most wasteful form of advertisement imaginable. It's a small step to imagine a world where advertisements around a sporting event are tailored specifically to an individual, if you subscription is linked to your Facebook account or Google search history. It therefore must be assumed if more targeted advertisement could be achieved live events would be subsidised to reach the appropriate audience.

Would you rather have advertising that you might be interested in or for soap powder ?

I assume we'd both rather have zero advertising while trying to watch television. I do find a real difference between general broadcast TV adverts, which I just mute, and the advertising on Eurosport (I subscribe to it online though it is on cable/satellite) which is usually more tailored e.g. when I watch cycle racing, many of the ads are for cycling equipment, travel, & sporting goods i general. When I watch motorbike racing it's tyres, motorbikes & equipment etc.

It's like when buying a magazine. I actively look through the adverts in my interior design magazine because they are all interior design releated. Whereas the ads in the TV guide, to pick an example, are actively avoided.

It speaks more about ESPN as a product. It's a terribly inefficient way to get info about your favorite sports teams. Most of the time its just 2 talking heads arguing and going on irrelevant tangents. Its especially bad with their radio station.

Other than live games, ESPN simply isn't competitive with the other ways sports fans follow their teams. You can watch highlights on youtube (without watching an hour long program), follow the good beat writers on their blogs, and get instant updates and breaking news from twitter.

I finally cut the cord thanks to Kodi, Amazon Instant and a DTV receiver. I realized last earlier this year that $150/mo. for TV when everyone in my family was literally watching one channel a piece was a massive waste of money.

I love it. The only things I watch are things I want to watch. I don't have my thoughts and opinions shaped by talking heads anymore. Most of all, I'm spending over $1000/year less. The money I'm saving is enough to pretty much cover the note on the brand new car I just bought. Can you believe that? I literally could buy a car with what I was paying to fill my head up with nonsense.

This will likely be an unpopular opinion, but it is just my opinion.

In the Midwest, the Kappernick debacle, and the downstream protests from nba players, lends itself as a figurative rotten egg on network's reputation. Nobody here disagrees with his motives, but they see his methods as despicable. Furthermore if people speak out against him, they're accused as being racist, which they aren't (false dichotomy). All of this ends up poisoning the brand. Getting constantly accused for something you're not, and then having to be reminded about it when you just want to relax leads to viewers migrating elsewhere.

>the Kappernick debacle

Earlier this year, ESPN had 10 million fewer subscribers than they had in 2013; they lost 1.5 million of them between February and May of this year[1]. That was months before Colin Kaepernick's first anthem protest in late August.

[1]http://www.outkickthecoverage.com/espn-loses-1-5-million-sub...

There is an accelerating trend of cord cutters. Any event upsetting a specific subsection of the remaining subscribers triggers a small cutting avalanche. But focusing on the trigger of the month is missing the root causes. The reason people cut is that the bundle makes less sense than competing offerings. The bundle is also so expensive that some loss of content is now tolerated.

I can only give my perspective .

However I would venture to speculate they've managed to alienate other groups of customers in the same manner.

How can anyone possibly care about doing or not doing a thing while a song is playing? How is this, like, a thing?

I'm actually one of the strange ones who's recently added cable tv, but I would jump at the chance to dump ESPN if I could. Garbage sports entertainment with the most annoying people imaginable discussing sports like they're debating federalism.

Do you just not like sports, or espn in particular?

Not as big of a sports fan as I used to be, but I dislike ESPN in particular.

I started enjoying some US sports broadcasts better in two ways: 1) Switch to SAP for Spanish, or 2) Put on 5.1 surround and turn down Center channel to Zero, which usually eliminates the Commentators and leaves the ambient crowd and on-field noise.

Paywall-removed: https://web.archive.org/web/20161210041940/https://www.washi...

(The "web" link method doesn't work when the title is changed.)

Ultimately the whole concept of a "channel" like ESPN is an unnecessary path dependence legacy of a time when we only had limited TV bandwith on broadcast spectrum and analog cable systems. In the long run I expect sports fans to be purchasing streaming video access directly from teams or leagues, or perhaps via an aggregator like Apple iTunes / Google Play.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the NFL if TV viewership continues to decline and networks can no longer pay huge amounts for TV rights, ESPN alone pays around $2B/year.

Can ESPN make up the loss of cable viewers by online subscription fees?

"SPN, too, has a streaming app of its own - but it is limited in what cord-cutters can view there. The app reserves its best programming for traditional TV subscribers to prevent too many cable customers from migrating away"

This says a lot to me. They are holding on to the cable dinosaur ways and then crying when people move on to other services.

"Eventually, ESPN may conclude that its subscriber losses are so great that the only way to retain those customers is to begin offering cable content more widely on the app, said Jan Dawson, an analyst at the market research firm Jackdaw Research."

Ding ding ding.

I just signed up for DirectvNow, so I'll see how I end up using it. I thought I would watch it more than I would but I've only seen about 2 episodes in 2 weeks.

This is a more general problem.

Radio and television finally admit, in 2016, that they’re competing with the whole vast Internet.

https://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/09/29/radio-and-television-final...

I literally had no idea the Olympics had actually started until occasional posts about it showed up on Tumblr. Nor did I realise it was in Rio until then.

The media hegemony broke absolutely the moment we could escape them.

I remember taking pride in having cable tv and enjoying watching live sports on ESPN. Now I've noticed the amount of actual sports coverage has decreased and in its place is their original content. I used to watch tennis tournaments on ESPN2 now those matches have also decreased and moved to their online portal, WatchESPN which still requires a cable tv subscription to access.

If I really want to watch tennis, I need to pay more and subscribe to my cable tv's sports package that includes The Tennis Channel. Maybe I should take up Golf, that's already included in my basic cable subscription.

Maybe the issue is that some guy using YouTube Live in his basement, is able to stream games at a higher quality and with less latency than WatchESPN...

Local team blackouts on streaming services like MLB.tv are the only thing keeping most people (who don't understand proxies and VPNs) from cutting live TV.

As a (almost) 50 year old dinosaur, the costs of ESPN and other sports related networks are what caused me to cut the cord - over 10 years ago.

Is interesting to see how in countries like mine, where almost everyone buy everything digital pirated. Services like Netflix are booming.

previous discussion of reports about the Nielsen estimate of ESPNs subscriber loss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076812

Gee, supply and demand has a really good solution for this last time I checked.

It's called LOWER YOUR PRICES.

Funny how people don't like capitalism very much when it works against them.

There are a bunch of legal obligations that make that impossible, at least in the short run. As somebody noted above, ESPN itself is locked into very expensive exclusive-carriage contracts with various leagues. And the providers like Comcast and DirecTV are locked into contracts with ESPN and other content providers. There's just no price flexibility, and won't be until things get so bad companies start failing.

It's not unheard of for contracts to be renegotiated, especially when it is so obviously beneficial to all parties involved.

You are right but my reading of the situation is that there is a systemic imbalance and counter-parties in the business are also under pressure making them unwilling and worse unable to be flexible.

Renegotiation can work well if there are deep mutual dependencies e.g. manufacturing chains. If the cord cutting dynamic accelerates there will be little time to hammer out such deals. The quickest and fairest route may well be bankruptcy court.

Sports has been in financial bubble territory for some time. Huge escalating contracts. Rampant corruption. Often a collapsing phase follows.

I thought the ESPN tank was specifically about players kneeling during the national anthem.

Perhaps, but ratings drops aren't necessarily directly correlated with subscriber drops.

>>(Don't get me wrong, shit like Conservapedia has been around for years now. But most of the stuff I read, for better or worse, has been pro-social justice, pro-multiculturalism, etc. until now. Do fewer people buy into that nowadays? Or is what I'm seeing the result of more people participating?)

I am a liberal too and multiculturalism is good to some extent but I hope you don't want to bring Islamic sharia based barbaric culture (e.g. honor killing, stoning women, throwing gays off buildings) in the name of multiculturalism.

But what I have discovered is the left/liberal failure to address the rational fear of Islam (the barbaric, vicious ideology) that is grappling the minds of most sane people.

Liberals and leftists are failing to address these issues. Their response to this threat of Islam is utterly dishonest: they shun even legitimate criticism of the barbaric ideology of Islam under the phony reason of Islamophobia/racism. People have fed up with this.

I don't support Trump to a large extent. But I see that many people see only Trump making an attempt to address this issue in a meaningful manner. No surprise, he cashed on it.

Sam Harris has put it quite aptly: Liberals failure to talk honestly about Islam is responsible for the rise of Trump [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCWf0tHy7M

From tmptmp's profile:

>Am I against Muslims? No, I do have many Muslim friends...

"I have many [insert ethnic group here] friends" is always a red flag. I'm just trying to figure out how you managed to get 700+ karma on here?

There are most definitely better places to wage your Internet crusade. Please don't junk up HN with this copypasta drivel.

You make a very good point about the thread going off topic (though you're doing it a bit yourself upthread) and rightly bring it up. Please do so civilly, though. Please don't junk up HN with this copypasta drivel. isn't constructive.

>though you're doing it a bit yourself upthread

I know, and I do feel a bit guilty lol. I suppose I should've just let his comment sit in the greys. You're right, there wasn't much point in being nasty.

There are actual neo-Nazis around here with 10k+ karma.

https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/806302878524575744

We banned the account immediately upon seeing that post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816#13064912

Needless to say, it was also heavily flagged by HN users.

Please don't be tempted to discuss politics in a partisan manner, especially taking things further afield of the submission topic, regardless of what's happening in the thread.

We've banned this account for repeatedly conducting religious flamewars, which is an abuse of this site. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that this won't happen again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144192 and marked it off-topic.

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