ESPN Spends More $$$ For The Rights To Air A Single ‘Monday Night Football’ Game Than HBO Spends To Produce An Entire Season Of ‘Game Of Thrones’

UPDATE (4:43 P.M.): An ESPN spokesperson reached out to Decider after the publication of this story and offered the following comment. “ESPN has an expansive multimedia rights agreement with the NFL that includes Monday Night Football games as well as year-round NFL studio programs, digital, international and other rights. We offer NFL content every day of the year across multiple networks and platforms – all of which we are able to sell ads against. Calculating the value of our agreement simply based on the schedule of primetime games is a woefully inaccurate accounting of our investment with the league.”

It’s no secret that ESPN has seen better days. As recently as a few years ago, the Entertainment Sports Programming Network was minting money at an unprecedented rate for its corporate parent, the Disney corporation, but a combination of rising programming costs and sinking revenues have the network’s future looking decidedly shakier. Today, Bloomberg Businessweek published a massive cover story called “ESPN Has Seen the Future of TV and They’re Not Really Into It,” a feature that goes into great detail about the company’s challenges to adapt their products (particularly their SportsCenter franchise) to today’s rapidly shifting entertainment landscape. The following graf caught our attention:

Other media companies, most notably HBO, have confronted cord cutting by offering their programming “over the top,” which is TV-speak for “on the internet.” More than 2 million people pay $15 a month for access to the HBO Now app, but that strategy doesn’t translate to ESPN. The network’s programming costs are far greater than those of HBO—the budget for an entire season of Game of Thrones costs around $100 million, or less than what ESPN pays for the rights to air a single Monday Night Football game—and ESPN’s customers are accustomed to getting the network at no additional charge as part of their cable package. If ESPN were to charge $15 a month for a standalone streaming channel, it would need more than 43 million subscribers to match the money it collects from cable carriers. HBO has about 35 million total subscribers in the U.S., including cable and over the top.

Holy smokes! ESPN spent $1.9 billion on NFL rights alone last year (!), which we don’t need to tell you is a LOT of white walkers, Batman. (That doesn’t even factor in how much money they spend to produce the actual game, either.) Football continues to be the most popular sport in the United States, and also the most watched programming in American households, which means that it’s still a very profitable investment overall. However, with more and more subscribers opting to cut the cord, ESPN is now facing some tough decisions about the best way to move its business forward.

The article goes to great lengths to paint the network as being at a philosophical crossroads; many internal executives are desperately clinging to a strategy of “defending the cable-TV bundle at all costs,” while others —including Disney CEO Bob Iger— are taking cautious babysteps into the OTT landscape, with a particular eye towards international expansion and the coveted “millennials with smartphones” demographic. To that end, the network is currently developing a new, as yet unnamed service that will offer “a mix of baseball and hockey games … as well as competitive video gaming, international sports such as cricket and rugby, and college football and basketball games from outside the major conferences.” To us, this sounds like the kind of scraps that you’d see on The Ocho instead of the gold standard, premium content people typically expect when they put a credit card on file, but what do we know? We’re just lowly bloggers, not members of the Bristol ruling class elite.

In the words of Decider pal Rich Greenfield (who is also quoted in the Bloomberg article), “#GoodLuckBundle.”