The new ESPN streaming service will show how much $ 30 per month will pay 30

Here is a scenario: you do not pay for cable television, but you like sport. And you hear that ESPN will now allow you to buy a streaming version of the sports channel. You therefore register, for $ 30 per month.

And here is an alternative scenario: you pay more than $ 100 a month for cable television, but you really do that so that you can watch sports. So when the autonomous ESPN arrives, you put your cable subscription and go to the $ 30 per month plan.

These two scenarios are good for the owner of Espn Disney. In any case, the company obtains monthly subscription fees on your part.

But for the moment, Disney must maintain in public that he is really interested in the first scenario.

“Our priority is to look at the 60 million people on the sidelines,” said ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro during a launch event on Tuesday morning – referring to the swimming pool of people who do not have a TV subscription.

But the truth is that ESPN and the rest of the television industry know that there are people who could stop getting cable television once they can simply get ESPN. This means that they know that the new service could help accelerate the continuous erosion of the cable television industry.

And that also explains why this launch ad – the service itself will be posted at the end of the summer, in time for the NFL season – takes place in 2025. Even if there has been intense speculation on a streaming version only of ESPN for a decade.

Indeed, Disney, as well as other television network operators, have spent years trying to keep a foot in each canoe: offering some of its best programs on digital services such as Disney + and ESPN +, while retaining other basic offers on its traditional networks, such as ABC and ESPN.

Because if the old television networks have passed out, they always generate significant income and benefits for Disney and all the other cable television owners.

Thus, in 2015, when the CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, for the first time panicked the industry by acknowledging that the ESPN subscription base began to shrink, the company hated going to an ESPN option only.

Quick advance to the present day: it is now common for large wired channels like HBO to sell their programming as autonomous streaming services. And companies with traditional cable channels try to understand how to get rid of most of them. See, for example, comcast plans for Jeoison most of its cable properties in a separate company, and Warner Bros. Discovery maneuvering so that he can do the same.

Are you going to pay $ 30 per month for an autonomous ESPN?

Thus, while Autonomous ESPN is a big step for Disney and the television industry, it is also in a mute. We have always been waiting for this, and now it’s finally there.

In the meantime: do you really want to pay $ 30 for an autonomous version of ESPN?

Because even if it will give you a plot Sports, given that the rights of ESPN deal with the NFL, the NBA and several of the largest university football teams, this will not give you all Sports.

In particular: NFL fans – the most important group of sports fans, given the domination of NFL television – will always have to turn to other points of sale to watch all the games, which are distributed via Fox, CBS de Paramount, NBC and Peacock de Comcast, and Amazon and Netflix. ESPN will therefore not be a one -shop solution for them.

This is a great reason why Disney, Fox and WBD joined forces a year ago to assemble, a larger package of sports offers. He was supposed to cost about $ 50 a month, and his existence was a tacit admission that Disney himself did not know how great the demand would be for an ESPN streamer only.

Coming was to be launched later this year. But in January, the three companies disconnected the joint venture. Now Fox launches his own sports streamer, and Disney and Fox could find themselves in a kind of transaction as well at the bottom.

So, on the one hand, the future that we thought about 10 years ago is finally there: you will have a lot of ways to pay for sport without having to register for a cable television pack.

On the other hand: now that we have it, we have no idea of ​​the number of people who wish.