As the legendary NASCAR philosopher Ricky Bobby once said, “You gotta risk it to get the biscuit.” And right now, Disney is testing that theory by flooring their ESPN car into Turn 3 at Daytona with a hope and a prayer. (Mickey and friends are smiling through it, but this feels a lot more Tiger King than Magic Kingdom).

If you haven’t heard… on Thursday, Mickey Mouse and friends finally pushed his chips onto the table with the launch of the ESPN “everything app.” For $29.99 a month, you get it all: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SEC Network, ACC Network, ESPN on ABC, ESPN+, RedZone, and whatever weird cornhole tournament they usually hide on ESPN3. That’s forty-seven thousand live events a year. The entire pitch is built around “one login.” That’s the marketing hammer they’re swinging, because in their eyes the thing standing between fans and happiness has been too many remotes and too many apps. And honestly, they’re not wrong.

But obviously Disney isn’t rolling this out of the goodness of their heart… They’re rolling the dice because ESPN’s been dying a slow and painful death. Back in 2010, ESPN was in 100 million homes. Today, it’s only 61 million. That’s nearly 40% of the audience gone, and with it billions in guaranteed cable fees. Cable’s toast, and ESPN’s been cooking (in a bad way) right alongside it.

The numbers aren’t cute. Just last year, ESPN posted a $103M quarterly loss. More recently, its operating income slipped from $778M to $687M (a tidy $91M drop for those who can’t math). Sure, they later squeezed out $1.04B in Q3 operating income, but that was on falling revenue: $4.3B, down 5%. And you don’t need a finance degree to see what’s going on here: they’re squeezing more profit out of less business, which usually means “we axed staff and jacked up prices,” not “we actually found growth.” 

Meanwhile, the rest of Disney’s empire is thriving. Parks pulled in $2.5B in profit last quarter, streaming flipped to a $346M gain, and shareholders are smiling everywhere else. ESPN, on the other hand? It’s the deadbeat cousin living rent-free in the castle while everyone else actually pays bills… and the family is starting to get real tired of spotting him gas weed money. Don’t even get me started on the brand slide. SportsCenter used to be a religion. As a kid, you watched it before school. Every middle-aged dad in America had it on before work. It was the daily sports Bible.

But now that we have Fox Sports sniping viewers, a million podcasts filling the gaps, and Twitter serving highlights in real time, ESPN feels like it’s living in the poorhouse. SportsCenter has morphed into Stephen A. Smith screaming like a smoke alarm with dying batteries, padded with debate shows literally no one asked for. Advertisers can see the fatigue. Fans are tuning out. And shareholders at this point would love nothing more than for Disney to just dump ESPN for good and come out with another season of Bluey (cha-ching).

So here comes the $30 app, tricked out with AI anchors, TikTok-style highlight feeds (ESPN labels “Verts”), and a multiview option so you can watch four games at once. While this is pretty cool… people aren’t subscribing because Hannah Storm’s cloned AI voice reads them the box score. What fans actually want is simple: games that are seamless, live, and free of buffering during the 4th quarter.

(Source: ESPN)

Which leads us to my biggest problem with this huge “everything app.” Thirty bucks a month is steep for the average consumer. ESPN+ used to be $12. Netflix is cheaper. Once you add Hulu, Disney+, Prime, Sunday Ticket, and your monthly sports tab looks like an electric bill in the middle of February. Yes, hardcore fans will pony up. But casuals (the real growth market) will ignore it and stick to TikTok highlights and illegally streaming games.

On the flipside, if this app miraculously sticks, Disney will have pulled off one of the greatest Lazarus resurrections in corporate history… dragging ESPN out of the grave like Gandalf  in his white robe drip and reminding everyone it can still gatekeep sports in the streaming era. Sadly if you’re a shareholder, I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Disney, Netflix, and Amazon as mentioned in the article.