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Most of you don’t care about this, yet. I just spent over an hour listening to the CEO for Disney (3 total hours) and ESPN was not well treated by the investors (who were heavily screened). At least twice it was brought up, “why don’t we get rid of ESPN and pull our services out of countries that lose money…. Bob’s reply was that the new gambling partnership for ESPN and PENN entertainment should generate money (they lost draft kings). Bob then said that the “inevitable move… to streaming for ESPN will help.
Here’s the weirdest one. Price hikes are coming across the board to the ad free tier. But, they are going to leave prices lower for the advertising tier. It makes them a lot more money to have advertisers than to have high paying subscribers. If you have “NFL Sunday Ticket…, it moved to Youtube. That used to keep DirecTV afloat. They’re pushing hard to get customer to do the streaming version. Ad to this Bally pushing to reduce the deals with their markets, but are probably going to go back to Disney (were part of Fox that Disney bought). ESPN, Disney and Hulu are all cracking down on password sharing too. Netflix did well with it.
At this point, you may need to look into secure VPN so you can see the games through ESPN. It also looks like it could all be on the table with Apple. Do what you will, but that was the summary. Higher costs, fewer markets, and force people into ad tiers.