How Many People Want to Pay for ESPN? The Web Will Tell Us.

Do you want your pay TV with sports or without sports? For years, that question has been more or less academic: If you paid for cable TV (or satellite TV, or telecommunications company TV), you got sports, and you paid a lot for it, because Disney’s ESPN and its related channels are the most expensive part of your monthly bill. Now, for the first time, you’re going to have a real choice. You can thank Dish Network and Sony for that: Dish Network’s Sling TV service provides a package of TV channels, delivered over the Web, that includes ESPN. And Sony’s Vue service, which launched in a handful of US cities, offers a bunch of TV channels, but doesn’t include ESPN. So now we get a real-world test: Do people really care enough about sports, and ESPN specifically, to pay for it? Or are they happy to pay for lots of other stuff but not ESPN? We won’t see the results for a while, but when we get them they could have important meaning for lots of people in the TV business.