ESPN is finally ready to cut the cable TV cord — after a decade

Here’s a scenario: You don’t pay for cable TV, but you love sports. And you hear that ESPN will now let you buy a streaming version of the sports channel. So you sign up, for $30 a month.

And here’s an alternate scenario: You pay upward of $100 a month for cable TV, but you’re really only doing that so you can watch sports. So when stand-alone ESPN comes along, you drop your cable subscription and move to ESPN’s $30-a-month plan.

Both of these scenarios are good for ESPN owner Disney. Either way, the company gets a monthly subscription fee from you.

But for now, Disney has to maintain in public that it’s really interested in the first scenario.

“Our priority is looking at the 60 million-plus people that are on the sidelines,” ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro said at a launch event Tuesday morning — referring to the pool of people who don’t have a TV subscription.

But the truth is that both ESPN and the rest of the TV industry know there are people who might stop getting cable TV once they can just get ESPN. Which means they know the new service could help speed up the ongoing erosion of the cable TV industry.

And that also explains why this launch announcement — the service itself will come online sometime in late summer, in time for the NFL season — is taking place in 2025. Even though there’s been intense speculation about a streaming-only version of ESPN for a decade.

That’s because Disney, along with other TV network operators, has spent years trying to keep a foot in each canoe: offering some of its best programming on digital-only services like Disney+ and ESPN+, while keeping other core offerings on its traditional networks, like ABC and ESPN.

Because while old-time TV networks are fading away, they still generate meaningful revenue and profits for Disney and every other cable TV owner.

So back in 2015, when Disney CEO Bob Iger first freaked out the industry by acknowledging ESPN’s subscription base was starting to shrink, the company was loathe to move to an ESPN-only option.

Fast-forward to the present: It’s now commonplace for big cable channels like HBO to sell their programming as stand-alone streaming services. And the companies that own traditional cable channels are trying to figure out how to get rid of most of them. See, for instance, Comcast’s plans to jetison most of its cable properties into a separate company, and Warner Bros. Discovery maneuvering so it can do the same.

Will you pay $30 a month for a stand-alone ESPN?

So while stand-alone ESPN is a big milestone for Disney and the TV industry, it’s also a muted one. We’ve been expecting this forever, and now it’s finally here.

Meanwhile: Do you actually want to pay $30 for a stand-alone version of ESPN?

Because while that will give you a lot of sports, given ESPN’s rights deals with the NFL, the NBA, and many of the biggest college football teams, it won’t give you all the sports.

Notably: NFL fans — the most important group of sports fans, given the NFL’s TV dominance — will still have to turn to other outlets to watch all the games, which are spread out through Fox, Paramount’s CBS, Comcast’s NBC and Peacock, and Amazon and Netflix. So ESPN won’t be a one-stop solution for them.

That’s a big reason Disney, Fox, and WBD teamed up a year ago to put together Venu, a bigger bundle of sports offerings. That one was supposed to go for about $50 a month, and its existence was a tacit admission that Disney itself didn’t know how big the demand would be for an ESPN-only streamer.

Venu was supposed to launch later this year. But in January, the three companies pulled the plug on the joint venture. Now, Fox is launching its own sports-heavy streamer, and Disney and Fox may end up in some kind of deal as well down the line.

So on the one hand, the future we were thinking about 10 years ago is finally here: You are going to have lots of ways to pay for sports without having to sign up for a cable TV bundle.

On the other hand: Now that we’ve got it, we have no idea how many people are going to want it.

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