I hope these layoffs help. The amount of live sports they make available to me is great and I don't want them failing only to have some other worse company take their place.
I still chuckle when I think about her time on the ACC beat. One of her last articles was after the 2012 Orange Bowl when she wrote that FSU had reached their ceiling under Fisher and would never win a title with him as HC. The next season we go 14-0 and win a title. Pretty much every fanbase in the ACC has a story like this about her
Does anyone watch her show though? I hated Skip and SAS as much as anybody but I understood that they got viewers. Hill seems like she's forced upon everybody even though she sucks.
It seems like espn is mostly broadcast in bars, offices, airports etc...I don't really know anyone who just turns on espn at home...you'd think they could just hire some nondescript people to host highlight shows pretty much all day and not suffer from too big a ratings hit.
I mean, unless you think ESPN is run by people who can't do math, then yeah, I'm assuming people watch the show. There are a lot of neanderthals out there. See: 2016
Live sports: 60% Highlights: 30% Interviews: 10% Opinion pieces and hot takes: 0% There's your master formula, Disney.
Does SAS get ratings? I honestly don't know. I understand that most people here hate him and I don't care for him much myself but I'm just wondering why he keeps his job
I'm actually fairly convinced that the higher ups at ESPN cannot, in fact, do math. That's why they overpaid for content and talent while failing to see the cord cutters coming. The execs at ESPN seem like they're really bad at everything right now.
In and out of the bedroom so I can catch a highlight. I'm talking maybe 5 minutes once per week. Started to just catch up on the twitter dot com
In 3-4 years when the contracts for tv rights come up for renewal i dont think it will go up and may in fact go down... I.e. players contracts may get smaller as a result. Gonna be interesting We're definitely in the middle of a big shift
I imagine they end up gutting the lower tier sports, hockey being one where they don't need to pay for talent.
Here's the thing with the political ESPN shit. It was fairly obvious to me, and anyone who reads sports journalism, which way these people vote. But its been like that forever. Journalism is a liberal business. The right wing Twittersphere has decided to make it an issue now, but most of those guys are not sports people. They get told ESPN is liberal so they hurl bullshit at them and act like that's the reason they're failing. Now I do think its stupid for ESPN to get political at all. There's no upside for them in that, but this whole SWJ/libtard media shit is just angry conservative twitter assholes.
The worst part is they refuse to adapt to cord cutters. They sit there like a petulant child and assume we'll return to soothe their wounds and it's never going to happen. If they open a $15-20 "all the sports you want" monthly streaming option they'd have a million cord cutters running back with their credit card info the next day.
The main issue is cord cutters. But the liberal thing is an issue that the left doesnt want to recognize but the right needs to understand its not the primary reason.
Other ESPN personalities are seeing their roles "significantly reduced," a person with knowledge of the situation told The Hollywood Reporter. They include Baseball Tonight's Karl Ravitch, ESPN Radio's Ryen Russillo and Hannah Storm, who has been a mainstay at ESPN for a decade and hosted various iterations of flagship SportsCenter,
I watched about 3 minutes of it last week. It was Michael Smith standing there in jeans and really cool tennis shoes talking about his favorite video games when he was kid and how E-Sports are awesome. I then asked myself what I was doing with my life and turned it off.
At worst, it helped push someone who was on the fence about whether or not to keep cable. Like I said, I have no idea why Disney would want ESPN to be, in any way, political. Your fanbase is mostly conservative, your employees are mostly liberal. You can't reconcile that, so stay out of it.
"Primed with personality" Just unnecessary. I stopped watching ESPN for anything other than live sports years ago. No need to pay some idiots millions of dollars to report some scores or give me the play-by-play.
Some form of their "basic" (the big three) sports package +1 a la carte. The +1 being your pick of hockey, lacrosse, soccer, rugby, wrestling, rowing even their poker or bowling. Pay more and you can add another. Price it competitive to sling. A semi-customized and leaned down sports program is an easy sell for most of the audience that left them
I don't think it is the cord cutters necessarily. They just failed to capitalize on getting live sporting events. They bet big on this hot take and sports personalities consuming people and that when the cord cutting started this was one of the big reasons. People want on demand sports as they can get their analysis via twitter/instant news like that. So they let the NHL slip, paid way too much for things like the SEC/Monday Night Football and now are so concentrated in their sports holds they have to resort to live bowling and softball which has to kill their bottom line. People want relevant live sports and ESPN holds very little with regards to that. They failed quite miserably in that department and it is showing now.
I freaking hate how Sportcenter's "highlights" include 75% more interviews than game footage and they show interview during the middle of the game. I don't care what Billy Donovan said after the game - I want to see what Westbrook did DURING the game. Their breakdown is 10% highlights, 60% hot takes and opinion pieces and 30% interviews.
damn their hockey coverage will be even more non-existant than it was before, unless they can continue to co-op TSN's talent like Lebrun.
What do they even do that's 'liberal'? I honestly don't know besides that shit with Bruce Jenner. I think their main problem is just horrid content.
Disney bought a sizable stake in MLB Advanced Media and will soon have a controlling stake it looks like. It's the platform used for MLB.tv and the NHL's streaming service. I would imagine that this investment is to reach more viewers outside of cable subscribers.