ESPN's Delicate Streaming Balance – Puck

ESPN's business plan is a modern media version of the old innovator's dilemma: Chairman Jimmy Pitaro needs to build its streaming business in the meantime at the same time to defend its cable revenues as much as possible and for as long as possible to facilitate the transformation. Of course, this kind of choreography – placing cable and satellite splitters and occasionally screwing them up – ensures that eggs will be cracked along the way. At the beginning of the year, for example, dealers complained en masse about ESPN's plan to join Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery in launching the sports streaming service Venu, creating a kind of cable-cannibalizing, skinny sports package that would weaken cable operators that rely on live sports to survive to attract customers.

Earlier this month, those feelings got even worse when Disney announced it would simulcast six more shows Monday Night Football Games, usually from ESPN, on ABC. Sales managers were understandably upset about this most valuable programming on their most expensive The channel leaked outside the package and was available on broadcast. “We’re basically just bill collectors now,” a sales manager complained to me shortly after the simulcast deal was announced. “We don’t make any money from video.”