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Message: [QUOTE="nelsonmuntz, post: 4673508, member: 833"] The cable model was really about forcing people who didn't use ESPN to pay for ESPN, or ESPN would pull itself off the cable system. There were dozens of public spats between ESPN and cable providers over pricing, and ESPN won every time, because it was basically a sports monopoly. This ability to force every single cable subscriber to pay ESPN's carriage fee was a massive revenue producer for ESPN, and made it difficult for anyone to compete with it. Fox had the financial muscle to get a foothold with a few conferences, and no one else could compete at all. Those days are over. Everything is going to be a la carte soon. The streamers all have the same problem. Original content is insanely expensive, and the audience response is uncertain. For example, Apple's The Morning Show costs $15 million an episode to produce. That is $150 million a season, for 10 hours of content, that a user can just wait until they have all been released, sign up, binge watch them all, and then cancel Apple until the next season comes out in 18 months. Apple needs enough new content to keep subscribers from cancelling. Max, ParamountPlus, Peacock and Hulu/Disney have huge libraries, but Apple does not, and Netflix has a lot of junk in theirs. The libraries may keep subscribers on for a while, but all of them need to produce new content, and that is expensive, and can be gamed by subscribers. Sports can not be gamed. It needs to be watched when it is played, and the streamer can advertise during it and viewers won't switch or turn it off. What evidence do I have? ESPN just paid a boatload for the Big 12 and SEC. Either you have to assume that ESPN is stupid, or that they are going to make a return on that massive investment, even in a streaming world. In a fragmented streaming market with few barriers to entry beyond money (which all of the streamers already have), if those leagues are worth that much to ESPN, then other content must be worth a lot to someone else too. [/QUOTE]

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