holy moses , they reach almost 1/3 of the population. no wonder their propaganda has legs..
but on a side note, ***k them
A huge part of their 'reach' is to people who pay for cable--and therefore pay ESPN's $5.50 per month carriage fee--but have absolutely no interest in sports and have probably never watched an ESPN show.
Now that cable providers are feeling the crunch from cord cutters and are starting to feel compelled to offer lower-cost packages, a lot are creating low-cost entry cable packages that strip away some of the highest-cost networks. That means stripping out the networks that charge a disproportionate carriage fee as compared to their actual viewer base, and ESPN is at the top of that list, since
it charges at least 4x the carriage fee of any other network. Sorry, had to bold that to emphasize that it's highway robbery. And it's no coincidence that when you read about economy tiers like
this one from Cox, it explicitly states that the main cost savings came from stripping out the most expensive cable networks, and ESPN is always called out by name in these articles as being the prime culprit.
In addition, the NFL Network charges a $1.13 carriage fee, which is the fourth highest of any cable network, behind ESPN, TNT, and Disney. But whereas ESPN, TNT, and Disney are all among the five most-watched cable networks, NFLN is nowhere even close to that.
Which means that as cable providers roll out lower-cost options to try to stem the tide of cord-cutters, ESPN and NFLN are the two easiest and most obvious cuts to make. Tell the average customer that they can pay $5.50 for ESPN or $0.33 for AMC, and they'll not only take AMC but they'll be offended that ESPN charges so much more.
The day a la carte channel selection becomes a thing, ESPN will die an incredibly sudden death. This is also why the NFL was able to bend ESPN over a barrel when it came time to pay up for MNF. ESPN is only able to charge so much because it's the home of live sports, essentially. As long as that's true, sports fans would go nuts if their cable provider dropped it. But the day ESPN no longer has live, exclusive NFL games, that will be the day every cable provider looks at that carriage fee, says "no thanks", and the customers realize that losing 20 hours per day of screaming lunatics on Sportscenter/PTI/Around the Horn is no big deal. The moment that happens, ESPN as we know it can no longer exist. So they need the NFL, the NBA, MLB, etc., and all the leagues know it. Robert Kraft knows that ESPN literally
can't lose MNF, and treats the negotiations accordingly.
ESPN's still living in the "people will pay for cable, and we're on cable, so they'll suck up whatever cost is passed along to them" world. The cable providers are realizing that that world no longer exists, particularly because millenials would rather just pirate everything than pay $80 per month for a bunch of channels that they've never heard of and don't want. I have a Plex server set up at my place so that I can stream any content I own to any of the TVs in my house, using my phone as a remote, as well as Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, etc. etc. And for all of that I pay a fraction of a cable bill's cost, plus I don't get subjected to commercials. And with all of that, I still pay for DirecTV, just because sometimes I like to turn it on and see what's on. But the moment I feel like they've overextended on price, I can cut the cord and bail and my entertainment experience will barely suffer for it. Most people around my age that I know have a similar type of setup, at least to some extent.
