The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop

Re:The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop by VanillaCafe on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @11:33AM (#10697384)

To be precise, I'd say the article's core argument is something like: The obfuscated upper bound of $40/mo/subscriber cannot be recovered since the transparent pricing upper bound is $20/mo/fan. ESPN currently accounts for approximately half of all revenue for major league sports teams. The internet is driving unbundling which is forcing a move from obfuscated to transparent pricing.

With that premise and those numbers from the article, the crash will be something like a 35% drop in revenue (bounded by 25% and 50%) for sports teams when the transition from obfuscated to transparent pricing is complete. That seems like a big deal.

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Re:The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop by digikata on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @12:21PM (#10697808)

I think the mistake is assuming that $20/mo/fan is the upper bound. That's just a baseline direct subscription number. What ESPN should do then is offer a menu of more specialized sports products on top of that baseline. I do think there's going to be a painful transition in their business model in moving from leveraging a price from a wide range of cable subscribers, to offering premium products directed at sports fans. But, for all the pain, I think there's plenty of money to be made.

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Re:The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop by spacecowboy_lon on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @12:35PM (#10697915)

$20 a month woudl be cheap when compared to the Murdoch Tax in the uk to watch skysports.

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Re:The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop by Symbiote on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @01:17PM (#10698202)

Or £5 ($8) a month for BT Sport, which has some Premiership football, though not all.

I'm not a [watching] sports fan — is BT Sport making much impact in Britain?

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Re:The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop by spacecowboy_lon on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @03:47AM (#10702615)

Its upsetting News international who have been lobbying to hobble BT

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Re:The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop by ams6110 on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @03:08PM (#10699060)

Pricing per-month is not the way to go. They need to move to streaming, and price per-event. $5 per event sounds like a great deal, and I bet I'd end up spending more than $40/month at that rate at least at certain times of the year (i.e. when my favorite sports are in season).

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