This is not quite accurate. You&#x27;d have to figure that if people are canceling subscriptions as part of a random process, then they ought to also be signing up for a subscription randomly too. When it averages out, ESPN should be seeing about as many people canceling as they see signing up if it all just comes down to noise.<p>If it&#x27;s not all noise, then there are a few different scenarios:<p>1. Some exogenous factor is causing more people to cancel <i>in general</i> than to sign up. This would mean that <i>across the board</i> every television content provider would be seeing similar subscriber loss as what ESPN sees. I&#x27;d argue that we&#x27;re not seeing that, even though there is huge rage against the major cable providers. People are tuning into live sports on network TV more than ever ... so if they are doing that, yet ESPN sees consistent subscriber loss uncompensated by complementary new account sign ups, it&#x27;s evidence that people are indeed choosing to drop ESPN specifically.<p>2. There could be an exogenous factor causing people to sign up for cable more than drop it -- in which case ESPN&#x27;s subscriber loss would be even worse. I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;re seeing this either.<p>3. It could be the <i>endogenous</i> factor that ESPN&#x27;s content offerings are no longer compelling. This is generally directly tied with advertising metrics, so if advertisers are putting a red flag on ESPN, you can bet that they did lots of due diligence to ensure they were measuring the right thing, and not some accidental side effect of exogenous changes in cable habits overall.<p>On this last point, I think it bears pointing out that ESPN has a lot of different digital properties. There is the WatchESPN app which provides a ton of <i>free</i> content that doesn&#x27;t require anything but an internet connection, even though it <i>also</i> provides more premium content that does require you to obtain login credentials through a supported cable provider based upon your level of ESPN subscription.<p>It&#x27;s very easy to see how they could use the overall viewership statistics of WatchESPN combined with the specific statistics based on the subset of viewers who actually <i>log in</i> via a subscription to watch WatchESPN content. From that you could derive reasonable estimates of the changing number of subscribers.<p>Add on to that things like fantasy sports accounts, &quot;insider&quot; subscribers, and so forth, and it should give you a decent holistic understanding of whether subscriptions overall are increasing or not specifically in response to ESPN&#x27;s offerings.