Joe Nocera, Columnist

ESPN Can't Afford to Go On Like This

Layoffs can't make up for the revenue lost as consumers abandon cable bundles.

April 28, 2017 at 2:14 PM UTC

Corrected

April 28, 2017 at 7:41 PM UTC

Joe Nocera is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the host and writer of the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

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ESPN, which laid off 100 people this week, has a multitude of problems, but the basic one is this: It pays too much for content and costs too much for consumers.

That didn’t used to matter because, thanks to the way the cable industry “bundled” channels, cable customers were forced to pay for it even if they never watched it. Now, however, as the cable bundle slowly disintegrates, it matters a lot.