The Patriot Post® · The Precipitous Decline of ESPN

News that Disney and cable company Charter had finally reached an agreement on Monday, mere hours before the 2023 season kickoff of “Monday Night Football,” brought a sigh of relief for millions of fans who would have been blacked out of seeing the game.

However, despite the last-minute deal, this latest episode revealed the continuing slow death of cable TV, and, more particularly, ESPN’s media empire.

Sports and political commentator Clay Travis has an excellent but lengthy article explaining how and why this is happening, but we’ll hit a few important points.

First off, Disney owns ESPN, which is the number one sports media company in the country. But Disney, despite all its wokeness, is not (entirely) why ESPN is dying.

Back in 2014, ESPN was on top of the world. Launched in September 1979, it had become the most successful cable channel/network in history. Thanks to cable bundling, ESPN was in 100 million households in America.

But that same year happened to be the beginning of a steady decline for ESPN. While ESPN is certainly not dead yet, it may be without a serious course correction.

So, what is killing ESPN? The short answer is Netflix. Or, to put it more accurately, online streaming. The cable bundle package model is dying, as evidenced by Americans cutting cable at an increasing rate and switching to streaming.

As of today, ESPN is down 30% from its 2014 high. But for the last-minute deal with Charter, the sports media company would have been down to 55 million households, or just over half of its 2014 total.

Meanwhile, Netflix — which first introduced the concept of originally created content (“House of Cards”) for its streaming service back in 2013 — created the media model that has become mainstream. Not only did Netflix kill Blockbuster Video, but its streaming model is now killing cable.

Back in 2014, the market value of Disney was roughly $84 a share. At the same time, Netflix was valued at $57 a share. Today, Disney is worth $81 a share, while Netflix stock has risen to $445 a share.

Disney’s ESPN is a large part of that market stagnancy. The sports media company is taking on water with its massive contracts for sports media rights. Paying for rights to run NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL games isn’t cheap. But with sinking viewership and revenue, at least by the old measurement, can ESPN afford multibillion-dollar contracts? The network can’t afford not to pay because, unlike Netflix, ESPN doesn’t produce much lasting content.

ESPN has simply acted as the clearinghouse for sports fans. Once the live sporting events are watched, however, most fans have little use for the channel. People tuned into ESPN because that was where they were able to see all the sports. Now, that near-monopoly is falling apart.

Finally, we said Disney and wokeness aren’t entirely responsible for ESPN’s decline, but clearly the network did itself no favors by alienating so many fans when it decided to wade into politics. When the channel took a hard-left turn, seen in such events as its ESPY “Arthur Ashe Courage Award” awarded to Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner in 2015, the writing was on the wall. It was a slap in the face to sports fans because it was a deliberate politicization of sports and, frankly, exploitation of a men’s sports legend.

That virtue signal told American sports fans that ESPN had lost its focus on sports. The reality of the shift was only further confirmed by ESPN’s embrace of Colin Kaepernick, BLM, and other hard-left political crusades. Sports used to be a way to bring people together, even while rooting for different teams. Now it’s just another element of life politicized by the Left. Why stick around and watch?