ESPN Is Going AWAY!!

this is not a video i was expecting to make when the news came today that espn was going to cut 500 jobs amid the coven 19 pandemic and a lot of other reasons i didn't plan on making a video about it because i didn't want to talk about a lot of people losing their jobs in a field that i work in especially this close to the holidays it's a really really tough thing but listening to clay travis on out kick the coverage he made a statement that got me thinking about what the future of sports broadcasting might look like and so even though this is a really really sad time for a lot of espn's employees not just the people who got laid off i believe that we could be witnessing a turning point when it comes to sports broadcasting in general let's talk about it [Music] so the facts of this case are pretty simple espn lays off 300 people and close 200 open positions at their company it represents the single biggest job loss in a day in the history of espn and this fall this is not the first time that this has happened and of course i'm sure any of us who have been following all remember back i believe it was four years ago now three years ago now when espn laid off over a hundred on-air personalities including some really really big names so this is not the first time that espn has had to do this and look i work in sports broadcasting so seeing something like this happen especially in response to the covet 19 pandemic that cost espn and disney as a whole a lot of money uh is definitely scary for me and it it's it's just sad for the people who were caught up in something like this you know i mean these are people that work very very hard and that probably love their jobs because who wouldn't want to work in sports however the reason why i am going to make a video about this when originally i wasn't planning to is because of a statement by clay travis on outkick the coverage that really just just kind of jogged my mind a little bit about the possibilities uh for what comes next in the sports broadcasting industry and i'm going to show you the statement that that clay made the the claim that he made that got me thinking so hard about it i would almost guarantee you that disney is trying frantically to figure out a way to spin espn off or to sell it to someone else because and this is interesting from a business perspective espn doesn't produce hardly any original content if you think about what business netflix disney plus hulu uh all of the hbo plus or whatever the heck it's called all of the streaming services by and large are about what controlling their own original content espn produces almost no original content that actually matters they rent the right to put games on from someone else so clay travis says that he believes that we might be watching the total collapse of the entertainment sports programming network that's what espn stands for if you didn't know by the way at first you kind of think well espn has 5 000 employees worldwide they cut 300 of them and then just don't feel 200 open jobs i mean you're talking about 10 of the workforce you know it's it's bad again it's tragic but are we talking about the collapse of espn well here's the thing i think we might be and there are several reasons for this now ostensibly the reason they're making these cuts right now is because of the coven 19 pandemic right and the pandemic cost espn a lot of money because the sports that espn paid so much money to be able to broadcast now aren't happening anymore from the mlb which which stopped for a number of months the nba which stopped for a number of months college basketball which stopped completely and hasn't resumed yet college football where some of espn's conferences didn't start on time that they're gonna broadcast and and a lot more i mean it's not just those sports espn paid a lot of money to get the rights to broadcast those games and they didn't get to collect on it but the reason why this is important the reason why i want to talk about it is because espn's business model is the reason that they couldn't withstand a pandemic like this one of the reasons the pandemic is tough for everybody for every business and almost every business in america has had to make cuts some way or the other but i wouldn't even be talking about this if this was the first time that espn had to make this many layoffs in a day or in a week but this isn't the first time this is a round this is several times that espn has had to make mass layoffs mass cuts and all of the other times didn't come during a pandemic it came because espn was losing money and according to fox news in august disney announced that the company worldwide had lost 4.7 billion dollars between april and june and its media networks groups which include espn was down 10 just in that time is that solely because of the pandemic i actually don't think so i think the pandemic probably has a lot to do with it but espn has a business model that is no longer sustainable when it comes to sports broadcasting nationwide let me explain when espn was founded espn started a radical movement in television and what they did was they said we are going to get on everybody's cable package and we're going to charge a lot of money for people to get espn on their cable package but the idea here is we are going to get ourselves on every television in every house in america and people are going to pay for it because they want the rest of the channels that come with espn even if they don't watch espn so for for most people around the nation if they wanted basic cable their basic cable package came with espn this was starting i believe in the mid 80s came with espn and espn charged you over six dollars a month to be on your cable package so if you were to actually break down your cable bill the the amount of money that you paid per channel it's something like you pay uh 20 cents for the disney channel you pay 30 cents a month for nickelodeon you pay let's say 90 cents for tnt i'm just pulling these numbers out of thin air this isn't actually what you pay but the point is that you're paying very low amounts per month for these other channels you are paying in excess of six dollars a month for espn even if you don't turn on the channel one time okay i have grandparents that never watch sports they never turned on espn ever they paid over 60 dollars a year for a channel they never even watched but espn was so valuable to cable providers because so many people did watch espn so many people wanted espn from monday night football to the nba playoffs to the major to the mlb playoffs i mean espn name a major sporting event espn has probably broadcast it at some point in its history so espn was so valuable for cable providers to have and therefore cable providers were going to charge that much so that you could have espn whether or not you watched it and when cable at one point espn i believe had 100 million subscribers and that was not too long ago i think that was in 2010 that's according to clay travis 100 million subscribers across the country you're talking about a third of the united states population subscribe to espn at six dollars or more a month if you're watching this video you have probably cut the cord on cable you probably have why because cable is expensive it is expensive cable bills can be in excess of 200 a month go to sling tv go to uh playstation vue youtube tv you're paying what 50 bucks a month 60 bucks a month maybe if you want the total package because now you're paying for netflix you're paying for hulu you're paying for disney plus now i certainly am you're paying for amazon prime hbo max you're paying for all of these other kinds of services you do not want to pay cable anymore an espn sustained itself on the revenue it was getting from you to have espn in your cable bill that's how it made its money yeah the advertising is great but the advertising really just paid for the amount that it cost to broadcast a sporting event the way the espn profited is because they charged you so much money to have espn on your cable bill well now no one has cable so now espn is hemorrhaging subscribers because people are ditching cable in large part because of what espn did because espn started the trend of charging you so much money for a channel that you may never turn on that a lot of people said i don't need cable anymore because i'm paying this much money for channels i never watch well espn is a huge reason why people started to make that shift whether they knew it or not so now espn is at a crossroads because espn the way that rights fees are negotiated for the rights to broadcast sporting events they're usually done multiple years in advance you do 5 7 ten year contract or more so the contracts that espn signed when cable was still around would have been using espn would be agreeing to pay the money they thought they would have had from their cable subscribers but now the cable subscribers have fallen off a cliff and espn is on the hook for all of that money because the rights fees don't get renegotiated now soon they're going to come up for renegotiation whether it's monday night football which is one of espn's biggest properties if not their biggest whether it's the nba which is coming up in a couple years uh because of collective bargaining i mean i mean you're talking about espn when you look at these rights fees i mean you are talking about hundreds of millions or billions of dollars a year for the rights to broadcast these leagues and these sporting events and espn simply doesn't have that money anymore because espn their business model was based off of something that worked in the 80s and 90s and they did not adapt when people started to switch over and cut the cord on cable espn did not adapt so now you add in the catalyst of a pandemic combined with the fact that espn is on the hook for so much money for the rights fees that they negotiated when they thought they were still going to have the money it means layoffs and it means a lot of them but here is the hope for us as sports fans as people who watch sports espn potentially collapsing because of their business model that they did not scale that they couldn't figure out actually could be good for the rest of us because what it means is espn which has had a monopoly on sports broadcasting for so long and and well deserved by the way i'm not saying they didn't earn it they earned it espn is the innovator of basically what we considered to be sports broadcasting espn did it but now that they might be going away or at the very least drastically reducing in size and scope what we could be seeing is a complete shift in the way that we consume live sports i really mean that think about all of these league passes think about nba i i forget the names of a lot of them but like nhl center ice uh mlb uh i forget what it's called mlb extra innings nfl sunday ticket you know things like this right the leagues themselves are offering you usually fairly expensive 100 a season or more in the nfl's case it's 300 a season or whatever it is but for that you get every game in every market both broadcasting teams so no matter who you're a fan of no matter where you are you can watch the games i really believe that that is the future i believe in this idea of rights fees that that espn and fox and cbs were paying i believe that that's going to go away because that is a model that only worked when you had a guaranteed stream of revenue via your cable subscribers but now you don't have that anymore in streaming the whole reason people are switching to streaming is because it's cheaper and so if espn switches over to streaming but they they charge you seven dollars a month just for espn well if you don't watch espn or maybe even if you do you're still not going to want to pay that so you're gonna switch over to somewhere else the thing with streaming is that it's all about a la carte and the advantage to the leagues themselves controlling their own broadcasting rights is because the leagues themselves can give it to you a la carte 100 a season you get every game in every market every broadcast there's other things that they add in you can watch games on demand you can listen to the radio broadcast i know that mlb extra innings they have like a stat a stat broadcast where they show up they show you a bunch of different stats that are being compiled live throughout the game and if the mlb can do that think about what the nfl can do if they start moving into this market think about what the nba can do with their dominance on social media right now i think i really believe that that is the future of sports broadcast the leagues themselves are going to control their own broadcasting rights and then these other places if espn is still to be around or bleacher report or out kick the coverage or fox sports or cbs sports any of these other places if they are to still be around they are going to have to dramatically shift the kind of content that they put out to make themselves valuable maybe they'll start doing local sports maybe in bleach reports case they've started producing actual original content game of zones they did uh gridiron heights they do they have a bunch of podcasts and things like that i'll kick the coverage they have clay travis's show and they have jason whitlock writing and they're going to have jason whitlock's show very soon that i believe is going to be the future and it again goes back to something that clay travis said that inspired me to make this whole video in the first place what clay travis said is espn is losing subscribers because they do not have original content you pay for netflix you pay for hulu you pay for hbo max because they have original content that everyone at every time is going to want to watch one of my favorite shows ever is friends it was in the 90s i was born in 96. so one of my favorite shows started broadcasting before i was even born and i paid for netflix specifically to get it and i pay for hbo max specifically to get it what do you pay for espn for what original content they're 30 for 30s i mean those are pretty cool i do really enjoy that but it's not enough i love the 3430s but it's not enough it's not enough to make you pay for espn it's not enough to make you pay for as much as espn needs in order to keep its business afloat and think about everything else i don't pay for bleach report i watch gridiron heights but i don't pay for it it's just there on my app and what i mean what original content does cbs sports have what original content does fox sports have you have your talk shows but everyone's so sick of the talk shows anyway and that's a big reason why espn couldn't keep people around people were sick of it and the espn tried to do different things when it comes to sportscenter when it comes to first take but first take is now a laughing stock max kellerman is a laughingstock as he should be that's what we have now espn has been relegated to steven a smith being the meme of the internet and and the whipping post for the entire internet that's what sports talk is so now sports businesses are going to have to pivot to doing something completely different producing original content that isn't just talk i don't know what it may be if i did i'd probably be making a lot more money than i am now uh to tell someone exactly you know what they need to do but all i know is what i'm seeing right now is very reminiscent of when netflix started streaming it felt like and and look i was young when netflix started streaming i think i was 10 11 years old when netflix started streaming my father was a was an early adapter of netflix both dvds and streaming because he's a really big movie buff and i remember at the time i used to go to hollywood video and blockbuster video in my area and i remember at the time thinking why would i do this when netflix is just going to show me the movies anyway i either don't have to leave my house i could just go out to my mailbox to pick up the dvds or i don't even have to leave my couch i had the netflix app on a nintendo wii and i didn't have to leave my couch to get netflix content that's what this feels like this feels like a dramatic shift in the way that we can the way that we consume sports content and i think that that's good for everybody i think that espn espn created for themselves a natural monopoly that's what it's called there was no government interference espn innovated so much that they became a monopoly in sports broadcasting and congratulations to them for doing it but now it's over that natural monopoly is over through the fault of espn and and the fault of no one because who could foresee what happened to the cable industry espn's natural monopoly is melting away and i think it will be replaced by original content produced by places like out kick the coverage and bleacher report and places like that and the leagues themselves will control their broadcasting rights and you will pay 100 150 a season and you'll get every game and maybe maybe i'm just this is an idea that's just popping to my head maybe the leagues will say you can pay a hundred dollars a season to get every single game in every market every everywhere and on demand live and on demand or you can pay let's say forty dollars a season and you can get the prime time games maybe the nfl the nfl right now charges 300 a month for a service that you can only get if you have direct tv that being nfl sunday ticket maybe the nfl will say you know what we'll charge you a hundred dollars a season and you can get the the game that you can get the national game for both time slots on sunday the morning in the afternoon you get the sunday night game you get the monday night game and you get the thursday night game if you want every game with the highlights and everything else then you pay for sunday ticket you pay for red zone but for a hundred dollars a season you can get the main games i have a feeling that maybe that's where we're going because somehow some way the leagues and the broadcasting partners have to figure out how to make money off of this because the old system that espn is now demonstrating to us is going away it's not going to work anymore and so we are going to see in the very near future innovation when it comes to live sports and when it comes to the sports broadcasters from espn to cbs to fox sports to out kick to bleach report to roto world and beyond we are going to see some innovation very very soon and thank you so much for sticking with me through this whole video this is a topic that i'm very passionate about so i went a little bit longer than maybe i was planning to but i think it's important and i think it's important that it's out there if you made it to the end i really really appreciate it and let me know in the comments if anything that i've said you have an issue with or or you have an idea for how to make sports bigger look hey we here at ga sports we're here for ideas maybe we can be the ones that innovate again if i could be the one that innovates i'd probably be making a lot more money than i am now but hey you never know so again we really appreciate you making it to the end of this increasingly long video subscribe we'll see you next time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: GA Sports

Views: 1,181

Rating: 4.2727275 out of 5

Keywords: ESPN, Layoffs, Cuts, Firings, Election, Trump, Biden, News, Clay Travis, Jason Whitlock, Outkick the Coverage, Outkick, Conservative, Liberal, NFL, NBA, MLB, Sports, Madden, NCAA, College, Football, NCAA 14, Gameplay, Franchise, Road to Glory, Video Games, Video, Games, Game, Gaming, Betting, Sportscenter, Jamel Hill, Hill, Anchor, Bob Ley, Soccer, Futbol, World Cup, Olympics, Radio, TV, Television, Talk, Talk Radio, FOX, Fox Sports, CBS, NBC, BR, Bleacher Report

Id: ir78pdpBkFE

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020