This article will get a lot of play.

It's on Drudge with a recent Tweet about it ... saying: "Tough Times at ESPN; Viewership Erosion..."

Tough Times at ESPN; Viewership Erosion...

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) March 30, 2017

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-30/espn-has-seen-the-future-of-tv-and-they-re-not-really-into-it

The Problem:

Viewership for the 6 p.m. edition of SportsCenter, a bellwether for the franchise, fell almost 12 percent from 2015 to last year, according to Nielsen.

...

SportsCenter is only part of the problem. ESPN has lost more than 12 million subscribers since 2011, according to Nielsen, and the viewership erosion seems to be accelerating. Last fall, ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in a single month, the most in the company’s history. The losses have helped depress Disney’s stock price—down 7 percent since August 2015, despite a big jump in the company’s film revenue thanks to a string of hits, including the latest Star Wars film, Rogue One. John Malone, the cable entrepreneur and chairman of Liberty Media Corp., has publicly suggested that Disney would be better off selling ESPN.

As subscribers leave the network, and often cable altogether, ESPN is stuck with rising costs for the rights to broadcast games. Programming costs will top $8 billion in 2017, according to media researcher Kagan. Most of that money goes to rights fees through deals that extend into the next decade. Last year profits from Disney’s cable networks, of which ESPN is the largest, fell for the first time in 14 years. The dip was small, about half a percent, but nonetheless alarming. ...

The Rebuttal:

I’m really tired of being painted as some sort of failing, sinking ship,” SportsCenter anchor Scott Van Pelt told the Washington Postin September. “It’s not like we’re losing money, we’re just not making as much. It’s a giant difference.”

ESPN still towers over its rivals in cable programming. Short of criminal enterprise, few business models in the world have been as lucrative. A typical cable (or satellite) bundle costs about $100 per household. In simplified form, when a customer sends in a monthly payment, the cable company sends a cut to each channel included in this bundle. Some channels get paid more than others, and ESPN gets the most. Carriers pay an average of $7.21 per month for every customer who gets ESPN as part of a bundle, according to Kagan. Fox News, by comparison, gets $1.41; Bravo, 30¢.

With almost 90 million homes still getting ESPN, that adds up to $7.8 billion per year. Sister channel ESPN2 chips in an additional billion, and that’s all before ad revenue (roughly $2.6 billion a year, according to Kagan) and revenue from the print magazine and website, which is the most trafficked in sports. Last year, Disney’s cable networks brought in $16.6 billion in revenue and $6.7 billion in operating profit—43 percent of Disney’s total and more than its theme parks and movie studios combined.

In some respects, the challenges facing ESPN are the same that confront every other media company: Young people simply aren’t consuming cable TV, newspapers, or magazines in the numbers they once did, and digital outlets still aren’t lucrative enough to make up the deficit.

Personally, I think that ESPN is relatively well-positioned in an era of cord-cutting.  They have the rights to tons of live-event coverage with the ad revenue that comes with that which also relatively protects them from cord-cutters.  They also have the best sports streaming going in the business with ESPN3 and WatchESPN app.

The executive consensus in Bristol is that the threat from cord cutting is greatly exaggerated. Although the audience for traditional satellite and cable is declining, there’s a raft of new services—including Google’s YouTube TV, Dish Network’s Sling TV, Sony’s PlayStation Vue, and a soon-to-be-launched one from Hulu—that are offering channel packages that look suspiciously like cable bundles, and that uniformly include ESPN. Aimed at millennials, these online services are designed for smartphones and devices such as Roku and AppleTV and cost from $20 to $50 a month. Even though these plans are cheaper than a traditional cable subscription, ESPN gets paid its usual $7 per subscriber by Google and the other newcomers, according to people with knowledge of the agreements. So far, more than a million subscribers have signed up, a figure not yet reflected in Nielsen data. “We think that this wave that we are seeing is really a signal of what is to come, and what the future will be,” Iger said on a February earnings call.

What say ye CB?