Julianne Elwell
Inside Sports Broadcasting
Dr. Whittle
17 May, 2023 Chapter 5 of the book and lecture mainly talked about the history of ESPN and how it has changed over the years. ESPN debuted in 1979, but I learned in this chapter that ABC purchased 14% stake in 1984 and then bought the remaining stake of 85% from Texaco for a total of $227 million. It was shocking to me to see just how much they spent on the company; I knew sports were a great source of money, but never knew just how much. As we have mentioned in the past chapters, sports have been moving online more straying away from cable. In this chapter I learned that in 2011 ESPN hit 100.1 million subscribers and has seen a decline in subscribers since then. It furthers the argument that sports are slowly moving to streaming services. In Chapter 5, I also learned about what narrowcasting is and how ESPN used it. They focused on the target audience of men and aired content that would draw them in such as the X games and the ESPY awards. It was more broadcasting of various events expanding their content.
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In this chapter I learned that there are more the 400,000 hours of sports programming available to fans, and most likely even more due to the rise of streaming. These live programming is what is keeping cable afloat for now, due to people wanting to watch sports live sharing the experience with thousands across the world. However, sports programing are not enough to save the cable industry. This causes sport networks to try to figure out a way to combine the old and new model of TV and streaming. From this chapter I learned what linear programing was and that it is when they schedule events and programing back-to-back to maximize