ESPN’s Destiny As Streaming Stand-Alone Gets Nod From Disney CEO Bob Chapek: “It Will Be The Ultimate Fan Offering”

deadline.com:

While the idea of ESPN going “over the top” as a stand-alone streaming offering has been bruited about for years, Disney CEO Bob Chapek enthused about the scenario and describe it as an inevitability during the company’s quarterly earnings call.“It will be the ultimate fan offering,” he said during the call with Wall Street analysts. “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.” Sports is also “the third leg of our domestic offerings,” he added. “Right now, that expression is through the bundle and I think that can become very powerful for us going forward into the future.”Asked multiple times by analysts during the discussion of fiscal second-quarter results to outline how such a shift of ESPN’s focus might affect its financials, Chapek declined to offer any preliminary analysis.

Even so, he also expressed more distinctly upbeat sentiment than either he or predecessor Bob Iger have in recent years. Chapek used the phrase “when it comes time to actually pull the trigger” (as opposed to “if”), but also cautioned, “We’re not 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.”In fiscal 2021, which ended last October 2, Disney disclosed in an SEC filing that ESPN’s traditional subscriber base dropped 10% compared with the previous year, down to 76 million households.