ESPN's all-access streaming service is bad news for local broadcast companies

[Howard Beale 63]

ESPN’s new all-access streaming service is good news…unless you’re a cable or satellite provider, or one of the many broadcast TV companies that rely on said providers.

 

ESPN is probably the last big reason why most people still subscribe to cable or satellite TV.  Now that ESPN is putting everything on its new streaming service, I suspect the holdout subscribers have a very good reason to cut the cord for good.  That’s obviously bad news for cable and satellite providers.  It will also set off a domino effect that means bad news for broadcast TV companies that rely mostly on retransmission revenue from said providers.  Cable and satellite providers now have more leverage to say no when broadcast companies seek higher fees come negotiation time.

 

Some companies are feeling the squeeze as I type.  For example, Scripps reported a $10 million quarterly loss “as a result of declining legacy pay TV subscribers.”  Gray reported a $2 million drop in retransmission revenue in its latest quarterly report as well.  These losses are very small compared to the revenue both companies made.  However, with ESPN’s newfound devotion to streaming media, the omnipresent threat cord cutting poses to local TV is going to get worse.

 

It's yet another reason why 2025 is a bad year to be in linear broadcast TV.

[TVLurker 203]

I blame all the companies who focused on profit instead of trying to make broadcast TV last.

[nomadcowatbk 152]

1 hour ago, TVLurker said:

I blame all the companies who focused on profit instead of trying to make broadcast TV last.

they never mention antennas when they have carriage disputes,  just other providers, local news and sports will eventually be paywalled, maybe the NFL will give free streams to the primary markets of teams, I'm starting to see commercials for "as seen on TV" products during the local breaks of smaller market stations instead of local business like car dealers

I guess ESPN will see massive subscriber drops during the slower times for sports like the summer, but massive increases when football begins again in the fall

Edited Wednesday at 02:26 AM by nomadcowatbk

[Hometown News 55]

On 5/14/2025 at 1:06 AM, TVLurker said:

I blame all the companies who focused on profit instead of trying to make broadcast TV last.

 

There are multiple factors to blame if we're going to do a full accounting of what killed traditional TV. I agree that greed is definitely one of them. Overpriced cable/satellite bills, extreme and intrusive levels of advertising, etc. It simultaneously got more expensive and more monetized while being less worth it. You could argue that the introduction of ads to cable TV, even though the original premise of paying for cable was that you were paying to avoid advertising, was the "original sin" that doomed the future of television.

 

I posted this theory a few months ago, and I still believe it: I also think the historic laziness of American TV presentation is a big part of it. Compared to other countries that had idents, live announcers (sometimes on camera a la MTV's VJs) and all sorts of other extras that made TV feel like a big event, the presentation of American TV has always been minimalist and impersonal. In the long run, I think it's cost the networks dearly since they never developed the same brand loyalty as, say, the BBC that might have helped them hold out for longer against streaming and make the eventual transition more graceful. 

 

That laziness and lack of ambition extended to the programming, too. Networks started cancelling shows before they could even find an audience because it was safer to just recycle the same formats over and over again. Cable networks that started out with specific visions all drifted into being the same general-entertainment channels with the same programming before decaying into a worse version of Netflix binge-watching with ads every five minutes. And of course, the lack of local programming besides news doesn't help either. Most broadcast stations' schedules are full of syndicated crap that clearly nobody misses on streaming.

 

Streaming is already heading in the same direction. It's becoming more expensive and fragmented, more encroached with advertising, too quick to cancel shows, and so on. It shows that the real problem was never traditional TV itself, it was the corporations behind it who simply can't help themselves.

Edited 3 hours ago by Hometown News