&gt; The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren&#x27;t for ESPN I&#x27;d have no reason to have cable. It&#x27;s the only reason I have a pay TV package.<p>During college football season I got a Sling subscription solely to watch college football (ESPN and the SEC Network mostly). I never even really used the Sling app much - it&#x27;s terrible, crashes a lot, and isn&#x27;t on AppleTV. I just used my Sling account to connect to WatchESPN. That, plus an antenna for the marquee matchups on the major networks covered everything I wanted to see this last year at 1&#x2F;6 the cost of a cable subscription.<p>All of my football-watching friends were doing the same thing this year.<p>The fact is, if I could, I would pay ESPN directly what I paid Sling for access to WatchESPN. Because, just like cable, Sling was giving me a bunch of stuff I don&#x27;t really care about just to get ESPN. There&#x27;s nothing else on TV that I can&#x27;t wait for other than sports.<p>&gt; With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It&#x27;s just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.<p>I really don&#x27;t think the problem here is technological so much as it is economic. The scalability problems could be solved if there was the will. But according to one article [0] an unbunbled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts. Considering ESPN is starting to feel the crunch [1] from cord cutting and is beginning to trim costs, I imagine it will eventually become a reality.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;dorothypomerantz&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;are-you-willing-to-pay-36-per-month-for-espn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;dorothypomerantz&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;are-...</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;cable-television-espn-households-layoffs-2015-10" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;cable-television-espn-househo...</a>