Woke, broke, and soon to get smoked:
CNBC’s Jim Cramer told TheStreet.com that Disney’s reorganization plan announced this week is writing on the wall for ESPN. “I think it’s really about getting rid of ESPN,” Cramer said of the plan to accelerate a direct-to-consumer strategy. The main focus for Disney going forward will be streaming, streaming and more streaming….
“ESPN used to be this unbelievable thing and now it’s just a really expensive thing they are having trouble monetizing. ESPN is no longer the precious place that it once was.”
“ESPN went from slightly over 100 million cable subscribers in 2010 to slightly over 80 million earlier this year,” Outkick’s Ryan Glasspiegel wrote this week when the Disney news was announced. This affects every cable network. Cable news has been thriving in viewership for a number of reasons, but it is still facing the subscriber declines of the rest of the industry. The issue for ESPN in particular is that they have by far the biggest subscriber fees of anyone in the business.
“This is the rough math: Between ESPN and ESPN2, the subscriber fees total about $10 a month. They’ve lost about 20 million subscribers, which is $200 million a month, which is about $2.4 billion a year in lost revenue.”
No matter how rich and powerful a corporation is, events will eventually overtake its situation sooner or later.