ESPN Plans to Dominate the Post-TV World

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The shift to mobile is of particular importance to ESPN, which has a lot to win in the new distributed media environment, but also, perhaps, the most to lose. The present is certainly not “post-TV” for ESPN. It is the most popular cable network in America and the only top-10 cable channel whose 18-to-49 primetime audience grew in 2014. It’s easy to be lugubrious about the future of old-fashioned TV, but sports can still attract record viewers.

The Atlantic reports although the company also owns one of the nation's most read print and digital sports magazines and a massive radio empire, ESPN gets the vast majority of its revenue from TV, particularly from its “affiliate fees.”* Every time a cable TV viewer pays her monthly bill—an average of about $90—an automatic payment of about $6 goes to ESPN, whether that household watches 100 hours of sports a week or zero. These fees, estimated to account for about half of ESPN’s revenue, add up to about $7 billion per year.

But soon, the most valuable piece of glass for ESPN could be the smartphone screen. In an average week, across all of its apps, ESPN delivers approximately 600 million alerts to tens of millions of phones. These alerts, along with ESPN’s more traditional digital offerings, such as its app and its new daily feature on Snapchat, have created a mobile Internet audience that is far larger than its television audience—but also, without anything like an affiliate-fee model to support it, harder to monetize.

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