The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop
There is a major logical error in this post.<p>&quot;Sports&quot; is not about to pop. Anecdotally, I would assert sports (NFL, NBA, futbol&#x2F; soccer) seem to be growing more popular to every day people.<p>What is potentially about to pop is the &quot;entertainment&quot; apparatus around Sports. Ie ESPN&#x27;s programming the majority of hours per day that sporting contests are not airing.<p>It feels like ESPN is going the way of MTV. I doubt that music is less popular than it was in the 90s, but the one of its strongest previous consumption channels was disrupted by dozens of access&#x2F; consumption points - and simultaneously instead of dedicating themselves to airing music videos, MTV began to divert a lot of their airwaves (and I would assume resources) to reality TV and non-music video content.<p>ESPN (specifically) is in a similar position. On one hand, they appear to be working hard to offer streaming options - but they haven&#x27;t gone all in on any type of consumption based or bulk access (to my knowledge)...<p>Instead, they put &quot;characters&quot; like Mike&amp;Mike or Stephen A Smith to put on shows that are related to sports.<p>Unfortunately for ESPN there are too many content options (as well as competing sources for contract rights) for them to skate on thinly veiled sitcom characters and _very_ poor quality highlights in a world where we aren&#x27;t locked in to 1 or 3 &quot;channels&quot; to access what is happening in the Sports world.