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Much has been made over the fact that ESPN has been shedding subscribers at an alarming rate—up to 15,000 subscribers a day, to be exact. While, as we’d pointed out a few months back, much of that may be due to viewers downshifting to very basic cable packages (broadcast channels only), the bottom line is that they no longer see ESPN as a must-have network. What’s ironic though, is that ESPN itself may have created the reason they feel that way.

SportsCenter is arguably ESPN’s most well-known product, the center of its universe. It’s a show featuring highlight clips of recent games that has the anchors discussing and debating the results of those games and predicting the outcomes of upcoming events.

All well and good, but over the course of its nearly 40 year history, it both introduced and then continually reinforced the notion that highlight clips were all you needed to watch of games that you don’t have a vested interest in. You didn’t really need to see the entire game. Viewers could see a few clips, listen to the hosts’ take on the game and not feel like they’d actually missed anything. At a time when everyone’s schedules are stretched thin, when employees are expected to be available via email 24/7, and where the lures of social media beckons, the notion of spending two to three hours watching a live sporting event seems like a giant ask.

Especially when the highlights reel is enough.

Now I’m not predicting the collapse of the Sports Industrial Complex, because as the high ratings for this year’s World Series proved, there’s still a whole lot of heart for watching live sports.

Just maybe not so much of it.

The NFL preseason starts in August and the Super Bowl is the first week of February, during which time games are played on Thursdays, Sundays, Mondays (and sometimes Saturdays). Major League baseball teams play almost 200 games spread over six full months. The NBA regular season begins in October and ends in early April, but the playoffs go on until mid-June.

Nobody has that much time. Not anymore.

We’ve all gotten in the habit of watching highlight clips, because, as SportsCenter taught us, that’s generally all we need to have an opinion on a game. ESPN was really good at pulling together highlight clips but the leagues and other networks and websites have caught up with them, to the point where even less internet savvy sports fans have come to realize that there are plenty of sites online that show clips and have commentary that they watch on their own schedule and not feel like they’ve really missed anything.

Or paid anything—many of those sites are free.

Fans have further figured out that the games they want to watch are rarely on ESPN, but rather, on CBS, NBC, and Fox, the three broadcast networks (along with TNT) that have spent big money on sports rights so that they have exclusive rights to the playoffs and championships. And that CBS, NBC and Fox are part of that super basic package they recently downgraded to. (And that if there’s a game on ESPN they desperately want to see, the local sports bar is a viable option once or twice a season.)

Resurrecting ESPN

So how does ESPN get itself out of this jam? There seem to be a few options: they can have their parent company, Disney, push to have them included in the super-basic bundles users seem to be switching to. That would be tricky, though, because Disney has paid a lot of money for all those sports rights, which is why they charge the cable companies such high carriage fees. In order to keep those bundles low priced, Disney would have to be willing to give up most of those fees. It may wind up being worth it for them however, both in terms of additional ad revenue and in stemming the tide of negative stories about how ESPN is losing subscribers at such a rapid pace. If those viewers are happy with ESPN, Disney can work on gradually raising the prices and upselling subscribers.

Another option is something Disney’s already announced: an ESPN OTT (over the top) app. That might appeal to fans who want to watch games and/or leagues that are only on ESPN, especially if the app went big on exclusive app-only content.

The downside, of course, would be that the churn rate on an ESPN app would likely be very high as viewers cycled in and out depending on what sport was in season. A lower price could ameliorate that, but again, given how much ESPN is paying for rights, it seems unlikely they can do much about getting the price down low enough so that fans don’t feel like they need to unsubscribe during the off seasons of sports they don’t care about.

ESPN presents Disney with another problem too, one that’s unique to sports: fans generally want to watch sports live, which means there’s not much long tail value to ESPN content. While Netflix series can be watched by audiences for the next 50 years, there are very few people who are going to want a watch a midseason baseball game five days after it’s over, let alone five hours. That means ESPN will need to produce much more programming than other OTT networks and that they won’t be able to rely on library content the way, say, a CBS All Access does. (ESPN does have a “Classics” channel that features notable games from years past, but there’s a limited number of games that meet that standard.)

Disney also needs to consider the fact that there’s likely no easy fix for ESPN, that viewers’ habits have changed and that the days when fans had the time to indulge in watching several hours-long sporting events each week are long behind us. Highlight reels may not be as engaging or as social, but they’re far more time-efficient and nobody does them better than ESPN. And that might be a clue as to how they can best approach the future.

“If you know anything about television, you probably know Alan Wolk.” That’s how Adweek describes the best-selling author of Over The Top. How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk currently serves as Lead Analyst for TV[R]EV.