ESPN is honestly the single biggest selling point FOR cable. If not for ESPN I'd have cut the cord long ago. Live broadcasts to millions of people at the same time make tremendously more sense in a broadcast model than a TCP connection per viewer model.
It works fine for sporting events that are expected to have fairly low viewership or for content like Netflix which gets preprocessed and pre delivered to closer-to-viewer nodes. If I'm trying to watch Clemson vs Alabama in the national title game and the feed goes out because so many people are trying to watch it at the same time I'm not going to be a happy camper.