I thought this was a fantastic piece from Awful Announcing on the issues ESPN is currently facing.

You can do better than Clay Travis

There are a lot of people running around today claiming the sky is falling. Not only are they wrong, but they fail to recognize that Clay Travis works for an ESPN competitor and that network is facing precisely the same issues.

What annoys me most are the SEC haters who love to crap on ESPN because they assume it's dedicated to propping up the "unworthy SEC" which is not at all the case, but that doesn't stop the ignorant from speaking about things they don't understand. That of course includes a fundamental misunderstanding of how the economics of major network sports are performing.

(03-07-2017 04:31 PM)AllTideUp Wrote:  I thought this was a fantastic piece from Awful Announcing on the issues ESPN is currently facing.

You can do better than Clay Travis

There are a lot of people running around today claiming the sky is falling. Not only are they wrong, but they fail to recognize that Clay Travis works for an ESPN competitor and that network is facing precisely the same issues.

What annoys me most are the SEC haters who love to crap on ESPN because they assume it's dedicated to propping up the "unworthy SEC" which is not at all the case, but that doesn't stop the ignorant from speaking about things they don't understand. That of course includes a fundamental misunderstanding of how the economics of major network sports are performing.

Agreed that the mothership of sports channels is always attacked while the Fox, NBC and CBS sports channels are ignored because their impacts are almost insufficient compared to ESPN.

The stats I want to see are the number of subscribers these sporting networks are gaining each month from the streaming services. Lots of people are trying the streaming route as it costs less than traditional cable and satellite. My concerns are picture quality and signal reliability. I maight be moving soon and plan on trying one of these streaming services.

As far as your haters comments go, I don't worry about that. Saban's success has made some programs make coaching changes to "tenured" coaches because they can't find a way to close that Saban gap. The East is full of new coaches. The West will start shedding established coaches this cycle; Freeze might be first depending on the NCAA investigation followed by Sumlin and possibly Bielema if the hogs can't get more consistent play.

Yeah, I'm interested in seeing if these streaming services catch up to the quality of TV production. Every time I've tried to watch a sport online, the broadcast quality is always spotty and fuzzy.

Maybe some of these services will come up with something better.

I will say Netflix tends to be reliable, but still get some data rate issues from time to time