I for one would kill to see an ESPN that has to court direct subscribers.
Getting people to pay to subscribe to you is a whole different beast from chasing ratings among an audience that pays for you either way.
ESPN may get ratings doing endless Tim Tebow stories, but I posit that the viewers that generate those ratings aren't the same people the network could successfully convert into subscribers. Fluff crap may get people to stop while flipping channels, but nobody is going to be directly subscribing to get it.
I'm a sports fan, yet like many other sports fans, I consider ESPN to be borderline unwatchable. The only thing I care to watch are actual game broadcasts. And what happens when wider direct distribution means that the sports world no longer needs ESPN's cable reach to get to viewers?
Getting people to pay to subscribe to you is a whole different beast from chasing ratings among an audience that pays for you either way.
ESPN may get ratings doing endless Tim Tebow stories, but I posit that the viewers that generate those ratings aren't the same people the network could successfully convert into subscribers. Fluff crap may get people to stop while flipping channels, but nobody is going to be directly subscribing to get it.
I'm a sports fan, yet like many other sports fans, I consider ESPN to be borderline unwatchable. The only thing I care to watch are actual game broadcasts. And what happens when wider direct distribution means that the sports world no longer needs ESPN's cable reach to get to viewers?