ESPN President Talks Apple TV, streaming


ESPN's John Skipper on Apple's TV efforts:

They are creating a significantly advantageous operating system and a great television experience and that television experience is fabulous for sports. We are big proponents of believing it would be a fabulous place to sell some subscriptions. We have ongoing conversations. They have been frustrated by their ability to construct something which works for them with programmers. We continue to try to work with them.

ESPN's model is based on getting on basic cable and making basically every cable subscriber pay them even if they never watch one of their channels. Recently Comcast even started charging everyone a $1 sports surcharge on top of cable rates, which seem crazy even for Comcast.

The numbers are huge and ESPN's contracts to televise events are similarly huge. I'm not sure what happens to ESPN if this model gets shaken up. I suspect a direct subscription rate would turn a lot of people off if Disney/ESPN tries to charge customers a rate that recover revenue lost from people who don't watch their channels.

I'm going to guess ESPN isn't going to move until it's out of options. That might mean when cable companies need to adapt by bumped ESPN out of basic cable.