ESPN's Everywhere Strategy
Alex Sherman
It feels like Disney is slowly, but surely, making Disney+ their vessel for all of their properties. In a world where Netflix is a one-stop-shop for all of their content, this seemingly makes sense:
Walt Disney debuted a dedicated ESPN tile Wednesday on Disney+ for people who subscribe to ESPN+, its sports streaming platform, to watch programming without leaving the Disney+ application. Next fall, when ESPN launches its yet-to-be-named “flagship” service, those subscribers will get full access to all ESPN content through the ESPN tile on Disney+.
And while those services require a separate subscription, Disney will use the tiles smartly to draw some more casual sports viewers who are Disney+ subscribers in:
Disney is making about 100 live games available to Disney+ members without a corresponding ESPN subscription. Those events will span college football and basketball, the National Basketball Association and WNBA, the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, tennis, golf, the Little League World Series, and UFC, ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro said in an interview.
Next week’s alternate “Simpsons” telecast of the NFL’s “Monday Night Football” game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Dallas Cowboys will also be available to Disney+ subscribers, as well as five NBA Christmas games.
They're also creating a new version of SportsCenter just for this more casual viewer, as well as a new studio show focused on women's sports – again, seems smart given the demographics of Disney+ subscribers versus typical ESPN viewers. And for any content not included for free, it will be an easy upsell:
ESPN’s programming will also be integrated within the Disney+ search, similar to Hulu’s integration earlier this year. If a Disney+ subscriber who isn’t an ESPN customer clicks on something that requires an ESPN subscription, the user will be prompted to sign up within the app.
Having said all that, I'm still fairly worried that Disney/ESPN are doing too much here. Again, I like the idea of an ESPN tab inside of Disney+ (which they also recently did for Hulu) and I think it makes sense to have a separate ESPN app for the more die-hard sports content seekers. But once you start to have both ESPN+ and next year's ESPN stand-alone app, things start to get fairly confusing, fast.
There has been some talk that both will continue to exist after the new service launches, but that makes no sense. There should be one ESPN streaming service, not two. And if you have access to ESPN via a cable subscription, how will that be handled? Presumably another type of log-in via your cable provider. But will that have access to all the on-demand ESPN content or will you need the separate subscription for that? Obviously, some of this is still being hashed out, but there's a real consumer confusion risk here of where to watch what – something ESPN has been trying to tackle in a broader sense for sports!
In a way, Disney/ESPN seems lucky that a judge has blocked Venu from rolling out or it would add yet another confusing wrinkle into the above. Would Venu have also been a tab inside Disney+ eventually? And would ESPN content be available in Venu too? Presumably yes in a just-put-everything-everywhere strategy. But it's all a bit too spaghetti-to-the-wall for my taste. Again, the competition here is really Netflix, both in terms of pure streaming time and also, increasingly, sports content. And certainly Amazon too with Prime Video going all-in on the latter. Both of those services have one hub, not two or three or four or five different apps and services – services which all require a different subscription, no less.1
Again, I like pulling everything into Disney+, but there's also a bit of a pickle with all this ESPN content, given the brand there. You don't want to do what Warner Bros Discovery has done to HBO... And ESPN has a real shot to own all of sports streaming, but that's probably not as a tile inside of Disney+.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Hopefully Disney makes a bundle that is more seamless and straightforward than the current Disney+ + ESPN+ + Hulu one... Or the 20 other bundle options that have been the works.