ESPN subscriber losses raise questions about the TV ecosystem
Business publications and their core audience only understand business culture and jargon.  So business articles about ESPN focus on historical revenue numbers, and talk about corporate spin-off as a means of &quot;unlocking value&quot;, etc.<p>Technical publications and forums like this are largely populated by young people and early adopters (i.e. the groups most likely to be cord-cutting anyway), and tend not to be sports fans.  So these discussions marvel at the fact that there are still dinosaurs who haven&#x27;t cord-cut yet, and suggest that the remedy is ESPN accelerating migration to a new technical platform.<p>As someone who actually is an avid sports fan, and socializes with other sports fans, I&#x27;m going to throw out a third factor for your consideration.  The... product... SUCKS... now!  It never gets mentioned, because the &quot;business&quot; audience and the &quot;technical&quot; audience doesn&#x27;t directly experience it so much.  However, applying Occam&#x27;s Razor, I think changes to product quality are usually the largest factor in changes to product fortunes.<p>ESPN has been on a long, slow shift from &quot;hard&quot; sports coverage to &quot;soft&quot; entertainment filler for years.  However, over the past two years this trend has jolted toward accelerating at a breathtaking pace.  For the core audience of sports fans, ESPN is basically little more than TMZ now.  It&#x27;s more discussion of off-field &quot;drama&quot; than actual sport.<p>Sports fans get tired of fake &quot;QB controversies&quot;, manufactured by ESPN talking heads.  They get tired of endless analysis of whether African-American franchise athletes like RGIII and Russell Wilson are &quot;black enough&quot;.  Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem was a legit story for the first week or two, but after 14 straight weeks of talk (<i>none</i> of which touched the underlying substance that Kaepernick is trying to call attention to)... I think sports fans of all political persuasion are long past done hearing about it.<p>TL;DR - ESPN is a sports network.  It has dramatically shifted away from serious sports coverage over the past two years.  Their core audience is growing sour on them, and subscriptions are dropping.  I believe that everything beyond this is just ancillary factors.