PM World: Disney Product Managers Face the Problems Regarding Sports

All we know that Disney is a huge and successful company. It involved many theme parks, film studios media networks and consumer products. However, there are parts of the company that are doing not very well right now.

It’s written in Productmanagementtoday post that ESPN sports network is one of such parts that is struggling.

Actually, the company’s stock value down by 24%. It’s time for Disney product managers to take steps to change their product development definition and deal with this problem.

For a long time, ESPN has been a powerhouse in the world of sports. However, operating income generated by ESPN for the parent Disney company has fallen by 6%.

One of the reasons is connected with ESPN’s costs that have been going up. It happens because ESPN pays a great deal of money to have the rights to broadcast football.

The bigger problem is that they are losing their subscribers. ESPN had 99M subscribers 2 years ago. Last year they had 95M subscribers. The number for this year is 92M.

What are the forecasts?

What Can Disney do to fix ESPN? Now they have some fruitful contracts. These deals are long-term deals (8-9 years). Since there are no other alternatives, they tend to benefit the sports franchise.

However, ESPN product managers really need to cut their costs. They’ve done this already by getting rid of hundreds of ESPN job places and dropping some of their on-air star talents. But this is not enough.

ESPN needs to make their on-air staff become edger to meet the needs of this type of market. They need to tackle topics like gambling and other racier topics. The product managers are going to have to make some changes if they want to stay in the game and up to date.

ESPN is still the place that sports fans go to get their fill of the sports that they love. It is not going to be going anywhere but it’s going to have to change.