The Worldwide Leader

  When I was growing up I could only get sports news from the 2 minute reports on the all news stations every half hour, the five minutes of sports reporting on the local nightly news, and the newspaper. In the 1980’s cable television brought the 24 hour sports network ESPN onto my television and I could get the scores and highlights on their SportsCenter show. Not long after the first all-sports radio station WFAN opened shop in New York with score updates every 20 minutes.

  For the next 25 or so years, ESPN continued to grow, merging with ABC before being swallowed by Disney where it currently resides as a large division in that monolithic company along with the Mickey Mouse, the Star Wars franchise, and Marvel Comics. The station is a major player in live sports with major investments in Major League Baseball along with college and pro football. All the same the station has been losing cable subscribers, suffered falling ratings on its properties, and faces competition from other all-sports networks like Fox Sports that bids up the costs for on-air personalities and broadcast rights to live events, any number of apps and internet sites that instantaneously provide live scores and highlights, and the growing world of podcasts and websites devoted to both general sports opinions down to specialized takes on individual sports teams.

  One of ESPN’s bellwethers was the SportsCenter franchise which bred a number of on-air personalities viewers would tune in to see. The show garnered high ratings and advertising fees and was shown with different hosts for hours on end and repeated overnight in a loop. As time went on Sports Center became less and less relevant. Top personalities were paid more to work elsewhere and left the company. Ratings and advertising fees have plummeted. What happened? Technology happened. Where once upon a time Sports Center was the only place to go to get highlights the internet has allowed other media outlets to have highlights available immediately and no one needs to wait for Sports Center to show highlights. Even ESPN is its own competitor in this regard. I can see highlights on ESPN’s website any time I want and never have to wait for a television show to bring them to me. The demand for immediacy is something the ESPN realized and even pioneered with their ‘Bottom Line’ showing continuous scores on ESPN2 in 1995.

  The decline of SportsCenter has led ESPN to try many new formats for their flagship show and so far most have failed to stem the ratings decline as more and more people get their information from the Internet. The Scott Van Pelt midnight SportsCenter has been a ray of hope with improved ratings and a loyal following in its midnight time slot.

  The biggest change for SportsCenter was the rebranding of the 6 pm SportsCenter as ‘SC6’ starring popular personalities Jemele Hill and Michael Smith discussing sports, politics, and popular culture in order to hopefully goose viewership. The ratings continued their slow decline. This downward trend wasn’t accelerated or halted by the firestorm surrounding Hill’s tweets calling the President a white supremacist and pointing out that boycotting the NFL may make the league take a different stance on players kneeling during the national anthem. Hill has since left the SC6 show and ESPN had moved the format back to its traditional roots and the ratings still haven’t changed from its downward trajectory.

  The problem with SportsCenter is its offerings are just too general. A baseball fan can watch the MLB network for round the clock highlights and there are NBA and NFL networks for basketball and football fans. The world is more and more specialized and that goes for sports viewers also. Any format driven by sports news and highlights cannot get the numbers of the past since there are more and better options for purely football, basketball, baseball, or even tennis and golf fans. The only way shows like SportsCenter can hope to thrive again is to be personality based like the SC6 experiment but this approach takes time to develop an audience and find the right personalities and even then, a successful personality be very expensive to keep since they will be sure to get big offers to switch networks at the whiff of success.

  ESPN’s other major initiative was the launch of their new morning show ‘Get Up’. This was originally supposed to be a show featuring Mike Greenberg of ESPN’s popular radio show Mike & Mike fame. Greenberg was given a new contract of 6.5 million dollars a year but as the show got closer to its premiere network stalwarts Jalen Rose and Michele Beadle were added as hosts. The ratings for the show have been tepid. I’ll give ESPN credit for trying. I like Jalen Rose a lot but I’m driving to work during his morning show and listen to his podcast on my drive home if I can download it when I’m working.

  If you caught the last sentence you are not alone. ESPN also understands that the online world is their path to the future. They had a head start in podcasting when Bill Simmons set up a number of podcasts under the ‘Grantland’ project but never figured out how to monetize it and frittered their lead away when Simmons left the company. Now their podcasts are increasing in number and have the same ads that most other podcasts have. Under new president James Pitaro ESPN is launching a streaming service that will generate revenue irrespective of cable subscribers. The purchase by Disney of 22 Fox regional sports networks will buttress the streaming service. The two regional networks I get from Fox as part of my $200+ monthly cable\phone\internet package from Mediacom gives me Timberwolves and Pacers basketball, St. Louis Blues hockey, and Cardinals and Royals baseball. If I was a fan of any of these teams I could easily see pitching ESPN $5 or more a month to see my teams play just like I pay $15 a year to MLB so I can hear the radio broadcasts of the Yankees (as well as every other team).

  Live sports is one of the proven ratings grabbers in the digital age because it is live and doesn’t translate to being viewed on demand after the fact and by making the Fox purchase ESPN has gained a major foothold in this area beyond their high priced national sports packages. Shows like SportsCenter and Get Up will always have their place at the network as signature pieces but by making their move in the digital space ESPN has shown that they are ready to get on with the future and continue their leadership in sports programming.