I agree that ESPN can't fire their way to profitability given the long-term trends in subscriber numbers (down from over 100 million homes some time ago to ~87 million today according to NPR). Yesterday, NPR mentioned that ESPN will be launching a direct subscription service like HBO Go. But, according to the reporter, the service will only have ESPN's second-tier games, not the national games on the flagship stations (ESPN and ESPN2, I assume). That strikes me as moronic. Why should I pay XX dollars a month to get ESPN3 castoff games? Yeah, that might get you some Stanford MBB games and maybe a football game now and then, but that's not going to make many sports fans decide to pony up the cash, will it?
I've never understood why the sports leagues/networks don't follow MLB's model and make games available to stream at a reasonable cost on a monthly basis, with no long-term commitment. You can see almost every MLB game for $20 a month on any device (a season-long package is cheaper, and there are sales now and then that bring the price down more). There's another MLB package available just on phones for a ridiculously cheap $3 a month. Why hasn't ESPN come up with something similar for <insert your favorite sport here>? The NPR report I saw said that ESPN gets $7 a month per cable subscriber. Surely they could come up with a per-season or per-game set of streaming packages that would recapture that amount or more from some of the cord cutters. I'm a cord cutter, and I would happily pay a reasonable amount for individual MBB/football games or a package of games. I think that there is a pile of money waiting to be made in PPV streaming, but no one outside of MLB is taking advantage.
I've never understood why the sports leagues/networks don't follow MLB's model and make games available to stream at a reasonable cost on a monthly basis, with no long-term commitment. You can see almost every MLB game for $20 a month on any device (a season-long package is cheaper, and there are sales now and then that bring the price down more). There's another MLB package available just on phones for a ridiculously cheap $3 a month. Why hasn't ESPN come up with something similar for <insert your favorite sport here>? The NPR report I saw said that ESPN gets $7 a month per cable subscriber. Surely they could come up with a per-season or per-game set of streaming packages that would recapture that amount or more from some of the cord cutters. I'm a cord cutter, and I would happily pay a reasonable amount for individual MBB/football games or a package of games. I think that there is a pile of money waiting to be made in PPV streaming, but no one outside of MLB is taking advantage.