ESPN Isn't The Only Cable Network Suffering

ESPN has been making investors nervous. The network's rapid subscriber loss has been blamed for the Disney's weak performance this year, but the worldwide leader in sports certainly isn't alone.

According to CNBC, More than 70 percent of the most widely distributed channels have lost subscribers in the last year, according to Nielsen data. Most television network owners have a channel that has done as bad or worse than ESPN's percentage loss since December 2015.

Overall, the number of households with cable or satellite hookups in the U.S. fell by 1.6 percent — those are people who disconnected entirely, so that figure represents a sort of minimum loss for widely distributed networks like ESPN (if you're already in every cable household, there's nowhere to go but down). That's why the median losses were around 2 percent for the most popular channels.

What makes ESPN unique among cable networks is the extremely high fees it charges distributors to offer the channel to customers. While that high price can be attributed to unique costs related to sports programming, it has also made the channel a target in slimmed down cable packages that aim to offer cheaper bundles with more personalized options.

CNBC notes despite figures that paint a picture of a cable ecosystem in slow decline, a number of channels saw significant growth over the last year.

Those include channels with relatively small distributions like El Rey and Smithsonian, as well as larger channels like Hallmark Movies and Mysteries and Discovery's Velocity, which still have some room to grow in distribution. Only two of the biggest channels — National Geographic and Investigation Discovery — saw growth in the last year.

Hallmark Movies and Mysteries not only saw an 8 percent increase in subscribers, but also a 46 percent rise in average viewership, according to Nielsen's numbers. Part of the network's success had to do with giving squeezed distributors some good options at a lower price point, said Bill Abbott, CEO of Crown Media Family Networks, the Hallmark subsidiary that runs the channel.

"We offer great value and we offer it at a very fair price to our distribution partners," Abbott told CNBC. "They're saddled with sports rights that are through the roof and far more expensive than they have value, and they're looking for good value and networks that people actually like to watch, and we fit into both categories."