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I disagree.

True, the average sportsfan only watches whole games of their favorite teams.

However, people love highlight reels. That's why Sportscenter is so huge.

Unfortunately, ESPN is moving more and more towards "personalities" and gossip and whatever. Just give me the highlights on loop. That way, bars, restaurants, people in their own homes will have it on in the background constantly.

EDIT: Sure, they need to do more content on the web and on-demand or whatever. But their core TV programming should be less TMZ-y. I don't care what athletes did on vacation.

> However, people love highlight reels. That's why Sportscenter is so huge.

Which is rapidly being replaced (to some degree) with things like twitter, instagram, snapchat, subreddits, streamable, and other social media/video streaming websites.

It takes next to no time or effort for somebody to roughly cut a highlight and post it to social media. Meanwhile ESPN sees diminishing returns polishing various replays and putting it in a half hour program that repeats 6+ times every morning. It's to the point every team/league even has their own social media accounts, and post the best highlights themselves. If I can see the major highlights directly from NFL's instagram account, why bother waiting halfway through sportcenter to (maybe) catch the right segment?

I feel like this is their own fault though. It sounds to me like they've got obsessed with the gossip model of journalism and turned people off. If you look at the UK, the BBC's Match of the Day is still wildly popular because the beeb doesn't really follow those annoying American trends.

This. I'm a huge baseball fan. I haven't watched SportsCenter in about a decade. I get my highlights from Twitter or a daily email blast sent out directly by Major League Baseball.

> Most "sports" fans are generally not "sports" fans. They are STANFORD fans. Or Arkansas fans. Or Michigan fans. Or Packers fans. Or Golden State fans. Or what have you.

> Firstly, if you are not a fan of any team or school or city at all, then nothing in heaven or earth would get you to watch ESPN anyway.

You're missing something big here: Gambling.

Still a subset of sports fans, although it's a big one.

Really big, and they are no longer glued to ESPN, they are glued to ESPN.com

A generic sports channel like ESPN seems to appeal primarily to the gambling crowd. Someone willing to wager on many games a night will watch whatever sports-ball game is broadcast. Daily Fantasy Sports players fall into this group as well. The question for ESPN is: Is this market large enough to sustain the network?

Localized networks like the various Regional Sports Networks, Fox Sports (insert City or State Name Here), Big Ten Network and Pac12 Network are stealing the casual fans of specific teams. All of the major sports offer streaming of pretty much every game a fan of a specific sport could want.

It's telling that the first new program ESPN added following the layoffs was a simulcast of MLB's Intentional Talk. Yet another talking heads show with a TMZ bent. I don't see this ending well for them.

"...All of the major sports offer streaming of pretty much every game a fan of a specific sport could want..."

Only they don't. If you think about it...

whenever you want to stream from the web... you generally have to enter your TV provider credentials. So if you don't have cable, you can't stream a lot of those games.

I have cable and subscribe to MLB.tv and they still blackout games because (I think) some local station bought exclusive broadcast rights.

MLB.tv is interesting because they generally don't have commercials. Oddly, I wish they did. When the broadcast pauses for commercials, my screen basically goes blank and the TV gets silent. I wish they would just switch to a whole stadium camera with crowd noise.

You can get around the blackouts usually by using a VPN service (like Private Internet Access) when you originally load up the stream.

Personalized subscription in sports is infeasible because of how TV broadcast contracts are setup. Take the example of the Premier League. When Sky or NBC pay for PL broadcast rights, they do it for the entire league and the Premier League divides the money equally to all the 20 teams. By the way, this equal division is a recent change and IIRC the Spanish League only started doing this in the last couple of years.

Now let's say I want to subscribe to only Manchester United content on NBC. Man United and the other top clubs are extremely popular globally. So this means the broadcast contract has to be tailored to each team and the more popular the team is, the higher the contract value for that team. Now this means clubs don't get equal money and if they don't, the smaller clubs will never be able to compete with the top clubs. This is the exact reason why TV money is now divided equally in England. So we're back to square one if we were to implement this.

"Most "sports" fans are generally ... "

boomers. And they're economically dying out as they retire and the medical industrial complex wrings out the last of their money. Plenty of things cost a multiple of ESPN's cost and are doing fine because they sell well to young people, think of the stereotypical $100+ cell phone service. The vast majority of ESPNs viewers remember when they heard JFK was shot, their viewers are not the Challenger explosion or 9/11 generations.

Baseball has died among youth and the average fan age is now going up more than a year per calendar year. NBA average fan is much younger, like middle aged gen-x. The majority of PGA viewers are nursing home age, golf is so dead, so cringy 90s/00s. The youngest sports are major league soccer and hockey about a third millennial or younger for both, the only pro sports of 2050 are going to be spanish speaking soccer and the few remaining northern state whites watching hockey, the other sports are dead when the boomers are gone.

There is also a compression effect not seen in the past such that the NFL superbowel now gets over 10x the viewers of the world series. The average baseball game has fewer viewers than my county has residents. The average NBA game is only slightly better. In the old days there was a "wide world of sports" concept which is already dead. There isn't a "sports" industry anymore, there's american pro football, soccer for the spanish speakers, hockey and nascar for the legacy being eliminated whites, basketball for the blacks, and the also-ran sports that statistically no one watches.

What?

No one in England is going to stop watching Manchester United games to start watching Chicago Blackhawks games, or even to watch some sucky MLS game. That's not happening man. Get that out of your head.

No one in China, Europe, the MidEast or Brazil is gonna stop watching basketball and start watching some sucky hockey game. That ain't happening either.

Do you have any idea the YoY revenue growth global sports leagues like PL or the NBA enjoy at the moment?

What you are saying may happen, MIGHT happen in your small neighborhood... though I doubt even that... but it certainly isn't gonna happen on a scale large enough to actually make the money that PL makes in a year. In fact, I doubt that American soccer and American hockey will even make the money something like the NBA pulls out of just China. Let alone global basketball in general.

Basically, you need cheap, accessible sports to challenge the global soccer and basketball behemoths. Something that could be played barefoot in a field. Or you need to JOIN the global soccer and basketball behemoths.

But yeah... sports leagues like American football, American hockey, or American soccer stand little to no chance of challenging those more global leagues growth wise. Best outcome for them would be to somehow link into those behemoths. And I can only see American soccer being able to do that... MAYBE?

Decades of experience in the USA indicate that no matter how popular soccer is internationally, the locals in the USA don't care. See also to a much lesser extent, nascar vs F1.

In the short to medium term I don't think the business entity known as ESPN or MLB can survive USA cutting the cable cord. You're probably correct that someone is going to buy most of the pieces at the bankruptcy auction and probably right for example that baseball will be popular in Japan and central america yet that won't matter for folks in the USA who will not be watching.

I've noticed the baseball thing. Baseball is the only sport I sometimes enjoy, and our stadium in Seattle (Mariners) is usually decently attended when I go to games, but watching away games on TV, I sometimes wonder, "Are they playing in a stadium that doesn't allow spectators? Because it's basically totally empty."

I totally agree with you...but I do think you are missing the large swatch of NFL fans that are "pure" football fans driven almost entirely by the popularity of Fantasy Football. I saw some crazy stat where close to 70% of regular NFL viewers played FFB.

It forces you to care about the performance of players across multiple teams as well as whoever your opponents players are that week.

The football fans I know tend to fall into two demographics: College and Pro. Basically determines which day of your weekend will be committed to watching football all day; Saturday...or Sunday?

Personally, I've been a die hard Clemson fan since before I was born so it's definitely Saturday for me. I haven't watched but maybe 2 NFL games a year for the last 10 years or so but I still play fantasy football.

I'm that mythical fan who watches full games for teams I don't root for—especially in basketball—but I don't watch ESPN unless they show a good game that I want to see.

They show endless hours of Sports Center—how much can you meaningfully talk about sports? Even most of the commentary in the games is stupid.

Granted, I listen to sports podcasts (and I really like ESPNs NBA Lockdown) but they have one hour, once or twice a week, and they stick to a fairly focused script. In an hour podcast they may have 3 minutes of 'commercials' and 5 minutes of filler. On a lot of ESPNs shows they just don't have enough to talk and end up filling the time talking busting each other's balls because I guess that's what a lot of sports guys do when they hang out

Just a quick note, it's the Detroit Red Wings and Boston Bruins :)

The solution you've outlined here is Bleacher Report's _Team Stream_.

(FD: I do some work for BR, though not on this product.)

Again... just an average fan's opinion.

But Team Stream sucks. It's all just little tweets of 6 second video or just text. Hardly any of it is highlights from games. And worst of all...

they are all preceded by 30 seconds minimum of auto roll video ads.

What analytics tools does BR uses to make editorial decisions? just curious.

Sorry, but I don't know and likely wouldn't be able to say if I did.

Monday Night Football has been very popular for years, and rarely does it feature your favorite team.

perhaps not most but the hard core fans (AKA die hards) for sure. And Hard core = $$$.