How ESPN Flagship Will Replace Cable

ESPN and Fox Sports have long been the glue holding the TV bundle together. That's about to change.

In the most basic sense, quitting cable is a function of when you cross your personal tipping point of what you can get on streaming vs. what you can’t.

Is your deal-breaker The Real Housewives of Insert City Here? They’re on Peacock. Is your deal-breaker CBS procedurals? They’re on Paramount+. Dancing with the Stars and Abbot Elementary Disney+. Sister Wives and Worst Cooks in America? Max.

With the exception of a few shows like MTV’s RuPaul’s Drag Race and E!’s House of Villains that the networks keep exclusive to cable until the season ends, essentially all U.S. broadcast and cable shows are available next-day on Peacock, Hulu/Disney+, Paramount+ or Max.

News and sports are more of a mix. CNN streams live on Max, but MSNBC does not stream live on Peacock. NBC Sports streams on Peacock and CBS Sports streams on Paramount+, but Fox Sports requires a cable provider. Disney’s ABC Sports, ESPN, and ESPN+ are a messy blur of broadcast, cable, and streaming.

The launch of ESPN Flagship in fall 2025 will make a critical mass of major sports — maybe all of major sports — finally possible without a cable package.

Cable’s Decline is Accelerating

Cable, satellite and telco pay-TV services peaked at more than 100 million U.S. households in 2018 and eroded to about 70 million by the end of 2023. Those services lost 4.9 million households in 2022, 5.4 million in 2023, and another 4 million through just the first half of 2024.

Cable channels have become a drag on the share prices of the media companies that own most of them. Comcast announced plans in late 2024 to spin off most of its cable networks into a new company, Warner Bros. Discovery has taken preliminary steps to do the same, and Paramount is getting taken over by billionaire-backed Skydance.

Disney and Fox have fared relatively better with their sports and news networks that drive the biggest per-subscriber fees in the cable bundle, which partly explains why they’ve held out the longest in making those networks available on streaming.

The enormous cost inefficiency of subscribing to both cable and streaming services (Peacock, Paramount+, and Max in particular) is that you’re paying for the most expensive content — sports — twice to get to the content that’s exclusively available on cable (ESPN and Fox Sports) or streaming (original shows).

If you’re paying for cable to get ESPN and paying for Paramount+ to get Landman and Lioness, you’re paying twice for CBS’s very expensive NFL package. If you’re paying for cable to get ESPN and paying for Peacock to get The Traitors, you’re paying twice for NBC’s very expensive NFL package twice.

If you’re hanging onto cable for ESPN, your choices are about to change.

ESPN is the Last Big Domino

For the millions of households that have kept their cable package for ESPN’s NFL, MLB, college football, college basketball, and tons of regional sports — particularly households that pay for the major streamers — ESPN Flagship at a likely $25-$35 a month will be a far cheaper alternative to cable at $100-plus a month.

For the first time, an ESPN subscription streamer will include ESPN’s full lineup without a cable provider. ESPN hasn’t announced pricing, but speculation has been mid-$20s to mid-$30s a month and cheaper bundled with Disney+ and Hulu.

ESPN Flagship may also include Fox Sports. ESPN and Fox Sports were the primary providers in the Venu Sports streamer that was to launch in fall 2025 but is not going forward. Wells Fargo media analyst Steven Cahall has argued that Fox Sports on ESPN Flagship would be a win-win for Fox and Disney — big per-user licensing fees for Fox Sports and a better sports lineup for ESPN Flagship.

Puck’s Matt Belloni predicted in early January that ESPN Flagship will include the full Fox Sports’ lineup:

Disney has a lot riding on ESPN’s first major streamer, dubbed “Flagship” and set to launch with the NFL season. All the more reason to supercharge the offering with Fox Sports, whose combo of the NFL and college football, World Series baseball, and much more would give Flagship more than $15 billion worth of sports rights in one service. …

Fox’s league partners would love the additional distribution via Flagship. Plus, it would mean a fat check from Disney. And this could be just one of many non-traditional tie-ups this year as the scramble to shift linear sports viewers to digital intensifies.

Is it happening? Probably.

Fox, which will stream the Super Bowl on its Tubi free streamer, could launch a paid tier of Tubi with Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Sports, and ad-free Tubi titles. But Fox could do that and launch on ESPN Flagship; if Fox can get a license fee Fox Sports that’s as good or better than it gets from cable providers, why not launch on ESPN Flagship and a new tier on Tubi?

ESPN content chief Burke Magnus gave this tortured response when asked on the Sports Media Podcast whether ESPN Flagship will include Fox Sports:

I suppose as a hypothetical, could other sports content be included in that, either at launch or over time from other entities? I suppose that’s possible. We certainly could do it with regional content from leagues or things like MLB at Bat or NBA League Pass, that kind of thing. I think anything’s going to be possible.

Streaming UX Will Get Better

Streaming is a messier bunch of interfaces than what you had 20 years ago when everything you watched — broadcast, cable, premium, PPV, etc. — came in through your cable set-top box. We’re not going back to anything quite that clean, but I think the TV user experience will get quite a bit better over the next few years.

The U.S. market now has seven major subscription streamers — Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, Peacock, Paramount+, and Max — that are universally available on the major TV platforms. Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Google TV all do a good job keeping track of what you’re watching across the major streamers, and Samsung TV and Roku continue to improve.

With the launch of ESPN Flagship, the TV platforms will undertake another round of UX trial and error to manage live sports. What’s on? What streamer? Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV do a great job of this already, and the other major sports streamers — Peacock and Paramount+ — will work with the TV platforms to get equal footing with ESPN Flagship.