Expected timeline revealed for ESPN's switch to full direct-to-consumer

ESPN will be selling its streaming services direct to consumer. Someday. The best guess for when the sports giant plans to roll it out is in 2025.

The New York Post’s Andrew Marchand doesn’t believe it will happen this year or in 2024. But ESPN, as a standalone service, likely will kick off in 2025 with far more content than its current ESPN+. It’ll also include NFL’s Monday Night Football,” the college football national championship games and the NBA.

During a Disney earnings call earlier this month, ESPN CEO Bob Chapek told Wall Street analysts.

“It will be the ultimate fan offering,” Chapek said. “It will appeal to superfans that really love sports. And I think there’s nobody but ESPN who could frankly pull that off. We don’t have a lot of specifics when it comes to structure, but we do believe that because sports is so powerful — in fact, in the last quarter, 46 of the top 50 most-viewed programs on linear TV were sports.”

Chapek added that sports also is “the third leg of our domestic offerings. Right now, that expression is through the bundle and I think that can become very powerful for us going forward into the future.”

At the time, Chapek told Wall Street analysts that the network wasn’t “ready to share the specifics of our models in terms of how it would take for us to reach profitability on that or the impact it would have on our linear business.”

But ESPN knows it has to be ready sometime soon because the cord-cutting trend is only escalating. The high point for the sports network was back in 2011. That’s when ESPN sported 100 million TV subscribers. The number dropped to 84 million in 2020, then 74 million in 2021. Marchand believes ESPN starts selling directly to consumer when the subscriptions dip below 60 million.

For context, ESPN+ has 25 million subscribers. And with the TV numbers, the total should be up there with the overall totals from 2011. However, there could be many people who have ESPN on their cable and subcribe to ESPN+.

Now, how much will it cost per month to subscribe to this service when it comes online? One analyst believes the minimum will be $12 a month.

But this is a matter of when, not if. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro told Bloomberg earlier this month:

“We’re going to get to a point where we take our entire network, our flagship programming, and make it available direct to consumer,” Pitaro said. “That’s a ‘when,’ not an ‘if’….We’re only going to do it when it makes sense for our business and for our bottom line.”