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Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger was speaking with CNBC earlier this week, at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. And talked about how its linear channels – ABC, Disney Channel, and Freeform – may not be core to the company’s business moving forward.
While not explicitly stating it, it does sound like Iger is hinting that those channels might get sold off. Iger has acknowledged the rise in cord cutting and stating that linear television is a “no-growth business”. He also conceded that linear television is indeed “broken” right now, Iger did clarify that live sports remained different than other TV genres. This is because of the pull that they have on fans, and the appointment nature of the broadcasts, live sports “stands tall: in comparison with the rest of traditional TV programming.
Disney is looking to launch a standalone ESPN streaming service
At the same time, Iger has also noted that Disney has had conversations with potential “strategic partners” about working together to launch a standalone direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming service for its ESPN family of networks.
While Disney does have ESPN+ already, it’s mostly an after thought. It basically shows all of the sports that other networks (including ESPN) didn’t want. But if they were to transition that into a DTC product, that could change. Since ESPN does have the rights to a whole lot of sports content. And it should, at least in theory, do better than Bally Sports+. That’s because ESPN would not be limited to only showing a couple of teams in each market.
Disney and ESPN executives have been discussing the possibility of putting all of ESPN’s programming under one streaming umbrella for quite some time. But these conversations have ramped up quite a bit over the past few months. However, Iger said back in February that the company was “just not there yet” when it came to making that big move.
However, we have heard that Disney has been working with cable and satellite providers to renegotiate their carriage deals, which would allow for a full streaming version of ESPN.
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