Lack of sportscenter is lame and harms any chance I would open up this app on the daily.
There are two separate things that happened with the launch today. There's the ESPN+ product, which is the $5 subscription services that lives within the ESPN app, and there's the relaunch / redesign of the ESPN app itself. If you login on the ESPN app and tell it all of your favorite teams and leagues, the app is very smart at curating content for you. Opening the app will start a stream of content that is essentially a personalized SportsCenter for just the teams and leagues you care about.
Example: Hammer tells the app that he's a Red Sox fan. When he opens the app on a random night during baseball season, the app is going to start showing him Red Sox content without him clicking, navigating, or searching for it. If the game is on ESPN, it's just going to start playing. If it's the ESPN+ game of the night and he's an ESPN+ subscriber, it's just going to start playing. If the game isn't on ESPN, the app will launch with highlights and the game cast right at the top.
So it seems like its not enough to justify cutting cable ties with ESPN...
You're right about that. Nobody wants you to do that, and it's definitely not the strategy. The goal is to give existing pay TV subscribers "even more" or to give non-subscribers a little taste of what they're missing. The goal is
not to convert a full MVPD (multi-channel video programming distributor) subscriber into an ESPN+ subscriber.
...but at the same time doesn't offer anything super tempting that we don't already get with the usual sports package.
I'm Googling to try and figure out what pieces of "what I know" are internal / confidential and which have been publicly announced. The original content will be very appealing to certain pockets of fans. Think Showtime's "A Season With..." or HBO's Hard Knocks
