Taking the pulse of ESPN | Hacker News Reader

Taking the pulse of ESPN

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18 pointsprostoalex54 comments

Think there was an article on here earlier either about ESPN directly or about cable in general. Someone had a real good point... ESPN used to be actual sports news, analysis, and coverage. Now it's like TMZ for sports. It's terrible programming talking about serious issues like Tom Brady's haircut.

I don't now about analysis, I don't remember a lot of that in the past, it's always been somewhat superficial. You're right that it's become louder and more TMZ in the past few years, but I think this is a general trend in media that covers news items.

Facts are not valuable; they are free to anyone on the internet. What's valuable is your ability to add entertainment surrounding those facts. How do you stand out against others doing the same thing? Be louder, more controversial, etc.

Given that we keep seeing the same problems in our society play out in various arenas (look at politics), my question is are the sociologists asleep at the wheel? Why are they not observing these patterns and offering up solutions?

If I were Amazon or YouTube I'd strongly consider making a bid the next time one of these leagues were available.

The UFC is up for grabs.

Why do you say that? It was just purchased for $4B last year.

UFC television rights. I believe Fox has them now.

Their current TV deal with FOX expires early 2018.

I think ESPN will pivot to an over the top service like HBO has and be fine by the time the rights fees are up again.

Shouldn't the service not be ESPN but ABC (which includes ESPN)? I would think that Amazon is a better position because of their diversity of content. ABC can match it, but ESPN alone cannot.

If Disney came up with it's own over the top service with Disney media library + sports rights that would be so dominant.

I'm just imagining ESPN figuring out how to own the Cable + Internet broadcast rights, whereas Amazon would only be able to bid for the internet rights. That alone gives them a huge advantage. Unless the sports leagues decide to split who gets what (which would be amazing for the consumer).

If I were one of the sports leagues I would be terrified of the next time one of these deals come up. On the one hand they are sitting on one of the few assets that still has some value live (though I tend to watch all of my sports 30 minutes delayed). On the other, the entire media landscape is having the margins sucked out of it in an impressive pace. Those rights deals are outrageously expensive for the people that get them.

I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon, Netflix or Google snapped up the rights deals at a blockbuster price. But I also wouldn't be surprised if the price was much less than people thought due to less competition as well.

Both the NFL and MLB already have high quality streaming offerings today, including more advanced features like chose your own camera angle. They just don't distribute these services widely because TV pays so much better. If prices drop too far, they'll probably just keep the rights and start streaming the games themselves.

Yeah I thought of that as one option, but that means that the sports leagues need to get in the business of streaming video. Now they can dip their toe in it because the numbers are so low, but to support the Super Bowl for instance you'd have to be fairly sophisticated.

to support the Super Bowl for instance you'd have to be fairly sophisticated.

That is a good point. Good old cable technology still has some advantages. From what I can find the current record for a single live video stream is 4.6 million concurrent viewers, and the Superbowl consistently gets over 100 million.

Right, which is why I see them to continue to outsource that to networks. Amazon and Netflix are in a position where they have the reach that leagues want, but they don't have the experience with live content. My guess is that is their (Amazon, etc.) hesitation in jumping into a bid.

My experience is that even the best streaming is lower quality than (analog) cable or OTA sports broadcasts. The compression makes watching streaming sports worse.

That's already happening. Twitter bid for Thursday package of NFL in 2016 https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/04/05/report-t...

Then Amazon bid for the same package in 2017 https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2017/04/04/amazon-...

Facebook just signed up to stream select UEFA Champions League games, but sounds like they bought extra inventory from Fox, not entered a straight-out bidding war https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-27/facebook-...

Yeah, I know about those. They are not exclusive deals though. Amazon has the "streaming rights" to thursday games but CBS will still be the primary partner. I'm talking about them directly competing with the networks.

with the professional teams flush with so much broadcast money there needs to be a bigger push to legally block them from exploiting deals from cities and counties for building costly venues at taxpayer expense. throw in the IRS really needs to revisit its rules which allow the write off of tickets to such events as business expenses

Totally agreed with this. As part of the selection criteria for the host cities, they should be some commitment by the city to do something useful with the venue after the event.

They're kinda forced to commit to do something else with the venue once the tax beneficiary moves https://www.yahoo.com/news/nfl-rams-gone-st-louis-still-stuc...

Who is going to create such laws? The federal government? Why should they tell cities how to spend their money?

If players have a union and collectively bargain, and the owners collectively bargain, then the fans/cities should also collectively bargain. Create a union of the cities that host the leagues, and have them bargain for rules such as no taxpayer subsidizing of stadiums.

Federal Government should not be allowed to tell cities how to spend their money, but something needs to be done what devinhelton said. Look up Atlanta about their stadium deals for the Falcons and Braves. The City Council basically ignored the citizens completely and went ahead to spend millions to replace 2 stadiums that really wasn't that old to begin with.

Did the city council get re-elected when they went against citizens?

Im not sure. I remember reading an article about it awhile back and wondered if they would get re-elected, though I cannot find that article at the moment. I believe it was to approve additional funds for the Braves new stadium. If I remember right, they kept anybody who was against the deal from speaking about it at the meeting. There was a big scene and they went ahead and voted for the additional funding.

The Braves aren't in Atlanta/Fulton anymore because the city wasn't willing to pay for a new city. They are in Cobb County - a suburb of Atlanta.

Cities do have a "union", it's called the city government. Fans (aka people) bargain by electing people that agree with them. So far fans (aka people) are electing people who think the cost/benefit of paying for stadiums is a net positive. If so many cities wind up taking a loss on the matter then I suppose things will change.

Actually the federal government underwrites these stadium deals through the tax code.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2016/09/09/top-...

Yep, everybody is paying for them whether or not they're into sports http://investigations.blog.ajc.com/2016/09/12/report-tax-fre...

I agree that everyone is paying for them via the tax incentives. But I think the media portrayal is often incorrect about who benefits. The benefits of tax-exempt bonds are split between the municipality issuing them and the high-income individuals buying them. But most of the gain is captured by the municipality (because the high-income people would be getting a lot more interest in a taxable investment so the municipality would have to pay a lot more interest to raise money if they had to compete with those investments).

Because tax exempt municiple bonds are used to pay for stadia.

If you just want to watch spots put up an OTA antenna and you will get as many games as you see on ESPN. What ESPN specializes in is sports commentary, which is often worthless.

This is not true for the vast majority of basketball games, Monday/Thursday NFL games, most soccer games of interest, or hockey. But if all you're interested in is local baseball, the NBA/NHL finals, or Sunday NFL then go for it.

I'm saying this as an NBA/MLS junkie that's cut the cord.

>> Monday/Thursday NFL games

Mondays are on ESPN but Thursday night is on network TV. Not that you'd want to watch a TNF game. And MNF is a good excuse to go to the pub and watch the game.

I thought Thursday nights were NFL Network only unless it was also your local team (which never had relevance for me as I didn't live in my home market). Has that changed? I haven't really followed the league since dropping cable a few years back.

This year 7 are NFL Network exclusives, the rest are simulcast to various places, CBS, NBC, Amazon

Last year I believe Yahoo and Twitter had a couple, TNF seems to be the place to experiment with different distributors.

http://www.nfl.com/schedules/2017/TNF

This isn't true at all, coming from someone who's done this.

increasingly this isn't true

it used to be the case that what ESPN offered was a deeper niche of games

ie, if the team you wanted to follow was Ohio State, you're probably ok with just the OTA stuff

if you wanted to follow, say Northwestern, your more at the mercy of ESPN

increasingly, that's not even the case

this year the college football playoff was on ESPN

the Saturday games in the Final Four were on TBS

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(it might be the case that limiting yourself to what comes OTA is a more healthy sports information diet, that seems like a different argument though)

This almost works for NFL, with the exception of Monday Night Football and non-market Thursday night games. But it doesn't really work for anything else, not even NCAA bowl games.

Not just worthless, it has negative value. They try and stir up controversy where there is none, just to get more eyeballs. Just like CNN, Fox News and CNBC do with news. (Yes, I realize that FN is the worst of the bunch.)

I can't bring myself to watch espn any more. They've gutted so much of their actually insightful talent, while retaining the hot take artists and trolls. And I don't need to be constantly bombarded with left-wing propaganda and outrage with my sports scores.

In addition, their broadcasts are just not very good. Watching TNT and Espn during the NBA playoffs this year was like night and day.

Yeah, it's another case of an old media company thinking that the internet is stealing the fanbase. No, it's because your product sucks. That's the only reason. There are still tons of sports diehards even among millennials who would get a cable subscription for nothing but ESPN if it wasn't such utter garbage.

Same. The only draw of ESPN for me was analysis and tennis grand slam events. I don't watch a lot of sports, but I love competition and statistics. Sports can give me both of those without me ever having to tune in. Replays of strategic moves (even when boring to the naked eye) is a big draw for me. ESPN has basically dumped all of that.

> it's another case of an old media company thinking that the internet is stealing the fanbase

Interestingly enough, esports fills all of these gaps for me, but I wouldn't say that they stole me from ESPN. ESPN shot themselves in the foot ages ago. The pre-game and post-game discussions of e-sports are full of break downs and actual insight instead of hot-take talking heads. There have been incidents of analysts trolling and giving super shallow answers, but hosts have been cracking down on such behavior.

Yeah, it is just watching a handful of people play a video game, but the strategy can get ridiculously deep.

Can you quantify that? Cause its not just ESPN that is losing subscriptions to cable cutters its the entire industry. There is basically no cable subscription channel that is adding subscribers. The best some can say is they aren't losing them as fast as others. They study this a lot. Its pretty clear from their data that millennials have a different media consumption pattern from their predecessors and that new consumption pattern is moving up the age bands as well. Anecdotely, I recently cut the cord, am not a millennial, and am a huge sports junky that had cable (actually satellite) just for sports. I did it because a) I consume less television generally these days and b) the value proposition wasn't there with all the other ways I can consume sports now.

ESPN is being hit the hardest because they had the largest piece of the pie that is shrinking. Also their sports broadcast deals are staggeringly expensive.

Finally, ESPN is not moving to a sucky product for funsies. They are doing it because contrary to our inclination people do watch the talking heads screaming at each other, in about the same amount as other programming, and its much cheaper to create.

[edit] another thing that might be driving ESPN more to the talking heads model is the way views are calculated. As part of the metrics there is some accounting for public places that are showing television so from a 'real' perspective the bar showing Around The Horn on mute to a few patrons in the afternoon is not very valuable to advertisers, but based on the metrics they use it is. Model error is real.

I think ESPN is being hit the hardest because their content costs the most. Look at this deal they signed. Can you imagine AMC or whatever other premium content channel having to spend 12 billion for a few shows a week?

Which of the following would you choose:

1) watching content whenever you want, however you want, without wasting your time with advertisements. Oh and you can also participate in a forum discussion including high quality replays, and can link to other replays, etc, etc

2) being subject to ESPNs scheduling, spending your time watching advertisements, and having to deal with an additional middleman (the channel provider)

It's a no brainer that other than the actual game itself, ESPN has nothing to offer that subreddits and other forums can't. And you don't waste your life with commercials.

It's interesting to see sports networks evolve in the same direction as political networks. When your product is based on shared culture it seems to degenerate towards tribalism.

I get a kick out of people saying ESPN is 'left wing' biased.

Nah, they're just bad content. Their competitors are trying to paint them as liberal, but they're just bad at content that isn't a live game and can barely be considered journalism.

They have a left wing biased, but it gets blown way out of proportion. ESPN's biggest problem is exactly what this article is talking about. They have spent so much money on TV rights, that it causes price of getting cable to go up and more people are cutting the cord because of that (not because they are liberal)

As someone not in the US, how can sport be presented in a left/right wing biased way?

In the US the sports media often talks about topics that are only tangentially related to sports. Like whether or not a sports team should accept an offer to visit the white house (a tradition for teams that win their league). Or about players that refuse to stand for the national anthem.

I agree that their problem is completely rooted in the fact that they have overpaid for sports contracts, coupled with the fact that they have no option but to continue to overbid for future contracts.

I think writers often have a bit of a left-wing bias, but many of the talking heads lean more right-wing. Consider all of the withering criticism you would see on these sports shows for Colin Kaepernick or Chris Kluwe. It's probably a money thing, in many respects: writers aren't wealthy, the talking heads usually are.

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