ESPN - Disney's golden goose

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A typical cable (or satellite) bundle costs about $100 per household. In simplified form, when a customer sends in a monthly payment, the cable company sends a cut to each channel included in this bundle. Some channels get paid more than others, and ESPN gets the most. Carriers pay an average of $7.21 per month for every customer who gets ESPN as part of a bundle, according to Kagan. Fox News, by comparison, gets $1.41; Bravo, 30¢.

With almost 90 million homes still getting ESPN, that adds up to $7.8 billion per year. Sister channel ESPN2 chips in an additional billion, and that’s all before ad revenue (roughly $2.6 billion a year, according to Kagan) and revenue from the print magazine and website, which is the most trafficked in sports. Last year, Disney’s cable networks brought in $16.6 billion in revenue and $6.7 billion in operating profit—43 percent of Disney’s total and more than its theme parks and movie studios combined.

In college 20 years ago, roommates and I spent $3/month each for cable, about right. Never had it or satellite before or since. Today pay TV consists of Netflix, HBO Now, and Amazon Prime accounts shared with family. This year as usual we hosted the Super Bowl, because I have the biggest antenna the HOA allows. I like sports, playing and attending, but there are only so many ways you can dissect a box score.

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I understand if the NFL's in you DNA. So does ESPN, which will offer a streaming service in 2018, joined by a Disney one in 2019. The latter may prove too tempting for my household when the exodus from Netflix occurs. Here's the current trajectory, I'm the black line. Welcome, brothers!

196.3 million U.S. adults have traditional pay TV (cable, satellite or telco), down 2.4% compared with 2016. By 2021, that will drop to 181.7 million. By 2021, the number of cord-cutters will nearly equal the number of people who have never had pay TV — a total of 81 million U.S. adults.

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ESPN+ coming soon...

Our first DTC product will be our ESPN-branded sports service, which will be called ESPN+. Launching in the spring, the product will be accessible through a new and fully redesigned EPSN app, which will allow users to access sports scores and highlights, stream our channels on an authenticated basis and subscribe to ESPN+ for additional sports coverage, including thousands of live sporting events.

We've given a lot of thought to pricing both the ESPN and the Disney-branded service. I can say that our plan on the Disney side is to price this substantially below where Netflix is. That is in part reflective of the fact that it will have substantially less volume. It is our goal to attract as many subs as possible as starting out.