During college football season I got a Sling subscription solely to watch college football (ESPN and the SEC Network mostly). I never even really used the Sling app much - it's terrible, crashes a lot, and isn't on AppleTV. I just used my Sling account to connect to WatchESPN. That, plus an antenna for the marquee matchups on the major networks covered everything I wanted to see this last year at 1/6 the cost of a cable subscription.
All of my football-watching friends were doing the same thing this year.
The fact is, if I could, I would pay ESPN directly what I paid Sling for access to WatchESPN. Because, just like cable, Sling was giving me a bunch of stuff I don't really care about just to get ESPN. There's nothing else on TV that I can't wait for other than sports.
> With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.
I really don't think the problem here is technological so much as it is economic. The scalability problems could be solved if there was the will. But according to one article [0] an unbunbled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts. Considering ESPN is starting to feel the crunch [1] from cord cutting and is beginning to trim costs, I imagine it will eventually become a reality.
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2015/03/25/are-...
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-television-espn-househo...
ESPN and professional sports are way over valued and forcing everyone to subsidize sports fans. This is literally the reason why people are becoming cord-cutters, they're tired of paying for things they don't want. Right now 1 in 6 cable subscribers watch ESPN but 6 in 6 cable subscribers pay for it. Cable companies really need to move to an a-la-carte pricing model if they want survive but they're afraid of the large networks pulling their bundles. It's almost like we need a cable monopoly or union to break the network monopolies.
Except that the marginal cost of providing ESPN service to people who do not watch ESPN is nearly zero.
A-la-carte pricing makes sense if the corporation is spending a-la-carte costs, but they're not: the cable hookup and maintenance costs almost the same either way. There are some issues with a cap on the number of channels that can be simultaneously transmitted in a cable pipe, but it's perfectly feasible to launch a few hundred simulcast channels on current tech. You're not paying for the stuff you don't watch, you're paying for what you do watch; Providing the selection of things that you can refuse to watch, is basically free.
Source:http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/dish-espn-trial-off...
$10/customer/month to Channel A, which has 100k viewers who only watch it
$10/customer/month to Channel B, which also has 100k viewers who only watch it
...
In 2018, consumer activists manage to break up SECC and institute an a-la-carte system.
In 2019 they can choose to pay $20/customer/month to channel A (which is going to charge enough to keep its revenue at $2M/month), or they can choose to pay $20/customer/month to channel B (which is going to charge enough to keep its revenue at $2M/month).
On top of that, to secure either channel you're going to need a $10 subscription fee to the service provider for hookup (which is going to charge enough to keep its systems operational).
A-la-carte pricing is a zero sum game for the median viewer, so long as the content and the infrastructure keep getting paid for. It is nothing like "But I just want to be able to buy an appetizer, why are you making me pay for an entree!", because appetizers and entrees are both real goods which cost money to produce, while additional permissions to change the channel to something else, are not real goods. Food prices will not drastically rise for the same dish, if the customers order less of it, while entertainment prices will.
I think people are hanging their monopolistic concerns, which are valid for the most part, on a-la-carte pricing, and it's just nonsense.
Non-zero marginal costs would further favor a la carte pricing as it would reduce actual waste, but even with zero marginal cost there is still subsidization.
On top of this, pricing has already been set and normalized in this market.
Netflix is 7.99
amazon prime is around 8$
hulu is around 9 for ad free
hbogo is 14.99 and is seen as premium in the marketplace
I cant see any network pricing themselves above HBO and being successful.
If the service remains the same, the total that consumers pay will necessarily have to remain about the same. Instead of getting the freedom to change channels, they'll be stuck with the limited selection they have subscribed to. The bundling business model is a natural best fit for the technology that permits channels to be streamed simultaneously over the same lines; Anything else is a waste for the consumer and for the company.
You guys are chasing illusory discounts: "If I just had to pay $5 to ESPN and I could drop everythng I don't watch..." cannot mathematically happen, because ESPN has to crank up their prices or end most of their production to survive as soon as their customer base drops by 90% due to the end of bundling.
It doesnt matter what ESPNs current revenue is, and it doesnt matter how many subscribers the lose when the shift towards a la carte.
The fact is that the pricing for sports content has already happened; if ESPN wanted to weigh in on how much sports should cost, they should have gotten to market before the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc.
ESPN can launch at whatever price they want, but if that price exceeds the price of the official league packages that i intend to watch, there is absolutely 0 chance that i subscribe to ESPN
You're chasing illusory revenues, "If I just set the price at X$, we could drop everyone who doesnt watch" cannot mathematically happen, because NFL et al would have to crank down their prices for ESPN to remain competitive.
>or end most of their production to survive
DING DING DING - this is exactly what will happen when espn finds out people dont value their more recent tabloid/drama centered content
An actual example:
I currently pay $150/year for NFL gamepass. This allows me to watch every single NFL game in HD live, including pre and post season games.
150/year is 12.50/month. IF ESPN released a service costing 13/month, i wouldn't buy it. What value does ESPN add to my existing NFL gamepass package? Do they think i would pay 13/month purely for sportscenter? purely for their terrible discussions of the latest drama in the sports world? Maybe if they offered some kind of sports news and debate like they did a decade or so ago.
This is ESPN's competition. They have to compete with existing services that already fill the need for watching sports.
I imagine ESPNs current broadcast contracts do not specifically allow them to move to a la carte structure, nor do i imagine it allows them to begin any kind of streaming service. I very much doubt the leagues are going to be very kind when renegotiating those contracts now that they all have their own streaming services.
A la carte that avoids ESPN, doesn't exist from the major providers (it's part of everyone's basic packages but ATT that I have seen). That was the point (6 of 6 pay for it).
I wish there was an unbundled option so I could buy just ESPN. That is literally the only thing cable companies have that I care about. Even better for me would be to just cut the cable companies out entirely and let me pay $20 a month or something directly to ESPN for WatchESPN access.
That subscriber will be worth a lot more once they can be targeted with individually personalized marketing content based on previous TV-watching habits, augmented with third-party data from other digital channels, web browsing history, purchasing history, etc. It's coming; YouTube proves it can be done. It's only a matter of time before we see different business models for the monetization of streaming content on more 'traditional' TV channels as well.
The alternative is a subscription model that would price out many sports fans, or obsolescence followed by slow death for want of revenue.
when i got my friends to watch the world cup at home i attached a $5 antenna to the DVR (i build a computer with a $120 TV-in card, and had never used until then!)
the image was not the best, but for live sports, who cares?! oh and it got worse every time a plane passed above.
anyway, the antenna was a very easy solution for the impromptu need for live sports.
For college sports, they're also the biggest player. The "big" matchups of the week (usually the highest ranked or most interesting teams) in each market are usually played on the major networks that you can pick up with an antenna from the local affiliate. But the rest of the games being televised are carried exclusively* on cable, usually on ESPN channels.
Keep in mind there are 128 Division 1-A (major) programs, and many more 1-AA and lower programs, so there are a LOT of games going on each week. Some games are played during the week, but the very large majority of them are played on Saturday. So there's way more going on then could ever conceivably be carried over the air.
During college football season, there are something like 7 or 8 games playing simultaneously on the various ESPN channels, not including the "Plus" channels that are only available digitally by WatchESPN.
There are a couple others out there (NBC Sports Network and FoxSports come to mind) but neither are bigger in sports than ESPN.
* Depending on where you live, you can also sometimes get radio broadcasts if you live close enough to the school in question that there's a local affiliate that carries the game. Rights for those are handled differently.
You can use your Sling membership credentials to sign into ESPN's app. The app does not crash from my experience - works a charm.
That's a nice use case for multicast. Worked for me over a decade ago. I can only assume the technology has gotten better since.
With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast.
Multicast is effectively broadcast -- it's (theoretically) great if what you're distributing is a live video stream. But we're moving toward a world where the vast majority of what we're watching is on-demand. While I could be wrong about this, my strong suspicion is that the technology hasn't gotten better in the last decade; most implementations just don't scale to the level that a service like ESPN would require (i.e., millions of nodes reliably receiving HD video), and I'm not even sure most commercial Internet backbones support multicast.
However BT (one of the big ISPs) uses multicast to deliver their TV service, so I assume BT their connections are capable of receiving multicasts if properly configured.
Surely at least some of the blame can be shared with the total abdication of the educational mission on the part of thousands of university administrators. The athletic tail has been wagging the academic dog for decades longer than Tivo has been around.
I'm a Clemson grad for example and 15 years ago, Clemson's athletic department budget was about $30 million a year (for all sports combined). Since Tivo, it's gone up to about $70 million a year but it's totally self sufficient as well. It's all fueled by donations, ticket sales and TV revenues. TV revenues account for about $20 million of that budget so half of the increase is purely from TV.
If you can identify another reason why TV contracts for the SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12 and PAC 12 suddenly skyrocketed in the last 15 years I would love to hear it.
I signed up for Sling TV over the summer to help get me through long sleepless nights with a newborn. It's an interesting service but there are lots of little problems like the above. I dropped it around Thanksgiving.
But every time I'm about to cancel, there's a big matchup on ESPN that makes me say "just one more month". And then since I have it I throw it on as background noise again. It's a vicious cycle.
Over the internet, it has to operate as a point to point TCP connection for each device so 50,000 people watching is 50,000 individual HD streams. If multicast over the internet worked it'd be another ballgame of course.
But 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams that happen to contain the same thing still seems slightly easier than 50,000 people watching 50,000 individual HD streams with different content.
I'm taking it as a given that the technology and infrastructure is already there to support millions of people watching different streams simultaneously, since that seems to be what Netflix does.
The equivalent of a CDN where each ISP has a box receiving the broadcast so that all of their local customers don't have to stream direct from ESPN will make it more tolerable, but the big hit will be on people trying to do it from cell networks.
When Netflix does it they are working with pre-optimized content. They get to prepare all of the video to stream in advance, optimize it for each screen size, transfer each variant it down to each ISP and then turn it on when it's ready. With a live feed you've got to do all that on the fly to each ISP appliance that you've got in place.
I'm sure it can be done, somehow, but I have serious concerns about the technological cost of scaling that for a huge audience. Just as a comparison here, the college football title game that just happened garnered about 29 million viewers on TV and about 800,000 streaming with WatchESPN. That was the most streaming traffic ESPN had ever had.
Yup. Unfortunately, even just getting ESPN (and similar channels like FS1 etc) means buying huge bloated bundles. I'm hopeful this will change in the next couple of years though.
That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking Dead that have community reactions as episodes air.
The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package.
When you break down the technology, that won't change anytime soon either.
With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.