Tuesday, February 05, 2013 5:43 PM ET
According to Walt Disney Co., regional sports networks are simply not even in the same league as ESPN.
"With a 33-year head start on the competition, unprecedented sports coverage, constant innovation in both programming and distribution, ESPN delivers incomparable value to multichannel operators as well as consumers," Disney CEO Bob Iger said during a Feb. 5 earnings conference call. "With long-term sports rights now locked in, we expect ESPN to remain the must-have brand for sports fans."
Iger noted that ESPN serves sports fans nationwide with 30,000 hours of live events, news and original programming across all networks and services each year. "Every week, more than 113 million of the estimated 230 million sports fans in America interact with ESPN for sports coverage and sports information," he said. "By contrast, emerging regional sports networks serve and the local teams with limited programming."
Though he noted that RSNs may compete for share in individual markets, Iger said: "ESPN offers an entirely different value proposition to sports fans and multichannel operators. ESPN delivers almost twice the audience of all RSNs combined and among the key sports demo of men 18 to 24, on average, [the] ESPN audience is more than four times the size of the audience of all RSNs put together."
Beyond the reach of the linear ESPN channels, the CEO noted that ESPN also leads in the mobile sports space. The network's authenticated mobile service, WatchESPN, is in 46 million homes, though that figure will jump to 55 million next month as new affiliate agreements take effect.
For the fiscal first quarter, operating income at ESPN fell year over year due to higher programming and production costs related to contractual rate increases for college football and the NFL and an increase in the number of NBA games due to the lockout in the prior year. Partially offsetting these higher costs was an increase in affiliate revenue.
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