That person probably jumped and waved their arms, begged ESPN executives not to keep spending money on sports rights like drunken sailors.Īnd that person was summarily ignored. Someone deep in the recesses of ESPN’s business department who looked at the cable revenue spigot and started to realize what was going on - the greatest business in the history of media was sputtering, just as ESPN spent greater and greater sums of money on sports rights. If they made a movie about the cord cutting disaster - and at some point they might - a quant would be the hero. A few million here, a few million there, slowly a trickle turning into a stream and then the stream turning into a river and before long there was a flood of cord cutters. So quietly, in fact, that most at ESPN and in the cable industry refused to acknowledge what was occurring. The era of cable and satellite cord cutting began in the fall of 2014. It was the crown jewel of the company, a profit spigot, the Titanic of the cable fleet. With the launch of the SEC Network, ESPN, the channel’s owner, stood at the pinnacle of its power, the company seemed indestructible, a gold plated money minting machine.īillions of dollars in profits flowed off ESPN each year, enabling all of Disney to flourish. The SEC Network was, in fact, the single most successful cable and satellite channel debut in the history of the cable industry. In the summer of 2014 the SEC Network would make its debut. Fox Sports FS1 had launched the prior year - yours truly appeared on the very first show in the history of the network, a 2013 college football preview show. One hundred million households were subscribed to ESPN, the most successful channel in the history of cable, and the apex of the greatest business in the history of media had been reached.Ĭable, satellite, and media executives were all blissfully unaware of what was coming. In the summer of 2014, the cable and satellite bundle peaked.
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