ESPN’s Jimmy Pitaro will decide the fate of cable TV

Ever since Bob Iger returned to lead the Walt Disney Co. in November, he's spoken almost every day with one of his key deputies, ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro. Iger is an avid sports fan with a deep knowledge of history. “He has forgotten more about sports than I'll ever know,” Pitaro said.

But these days, the two executives don't focus much on the past.

Many of their conversations, Pitaro said in a recent interview, concern ESPN's future specifically, its streaming service, ESPN+, and deciding the right moment to someday offer the full channel to the growing legions of cable cord-cutters.


“We're going to get to a point where we take our entire network, our flagship programming, and make it available direct to consumer,” Pitaro said. “That's a ‘when’, not an ‘if ’. We're only going to do it when it makes sense for our business and for our bottom line.”

For now, ESPN operates two largely distinct businesses. It shows the biggest sports matchups almost exclusively on traditional TV channels and for good reason. Last year, TV viewers generated $28 billion in revenue for Disney, the most of any big media company. At the same time, it's airing more live sports on ESPN+, a $10-a-month streaming service that launched five years ago.

The network's streaming ambitions keep growing. As part of ongoing negotiations with the NBA over a new contract that will take effect in 2025, ESPN executives want to acquire the rights to put pro basketball games on ESPN+. “I'm confident we're going to see eye-to-eye on how to prioritize streaming,” Pitaro said of talks with the league.

With ESPN's streaming subscribers growing and its cable subscribers shrinking, the two businesses are starting to converge. Trying to forecast exactly when ESPN's TV slate will go online has become one of the great guessing games of the media industry. Inside ESPN, executives have long wrestled with the math, studying data and graphs, and calculating how many subscribers they'd need to attract and at what price for a streaming version of ESPN to replace the money they now get from pay-TV distributors.