ESPN Fires Longtime NFL Insider John Clayton

[kdnist]

That really doesn't have much to do with the issues ESPN is having lately. I mean the ratings for their sports events are not really down in the ratings. The ratings for what they now call Sportscenter and the rest of the junk is tanking but that's because it sucks not because people are moving towards streaming.

But even if the ratings were down the secret everyone doesn't seem to get is ESPN makes a ton of money whether you watch it or not. If you don't have a TV with a special box to calculate the ratings (Nielson box) it doesn't effect squat if you boycott watching the channel or something. TV cable networks make tons of money from your cable bill and ESPN makes by far the most from your bill. It is something like $7 a month from everybody who has a cable package that includes them. So even if you were a 100 year old grandmother who didn't watch ESPN for a second you were paying ESPN almost $100 a year to be on your cable package. This outrageous cable fee was justified because ESPN kept buying the rights to every sports league for an ever increasing amount. That amount has now passed the point of being profitable and that money loss is hurting Disney who is trying to desperately stop the bleeding at ESPN (by firing expensive talent). But that's just a drop in the bucket and a short term solution as every day more people are finding it pointless to pay $1000+ a year for cable TV that contains no channels and no content that you want. Wouldn't you rather have $7500 after 5 years of no cable TV than having cable TV for that time?

So yeah people cutting the cord and just buying an antenna and getting crystal clear HD channels of FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc for FREE is destroying ESPN which relies the most on cable TV fees. Even if it hurts other channels those channels do not owe billions of dollars to the NBA, NFL, etc. which is why ESPN is taking the brunt of the damage.

I think we are trying to say the same thing. You went from disagreeing with me to saying exactly what I was intending to portray. There are alot of very real things going on with ESPN for sure.

[scottkoz20]

Having worked in the Cable industry for 12 years, there were 2 things you could set your clock to

1) Rate hikes in February
2) Rights holders (Disney, Viacom, etc.) trying to get more and more money from the MSOs (Comcast, Spectrum, DirectTV, Dish...) because they were losing more and more dollars for advertising (and paying more for rights to items) when the contracts were set to expire - which those costs are past onto you the consumer as mentioned earlier