ESPN’s Plan to Dominate the Post-TV World
Rather than force a unified ESPN style onto every social-media platform, the team takes care to learn the local language of every territory of the Internet—experimenting with live feeds on its homepage, studying which stories fly furthest on Facebook, and practicing the goofball patois of Snapchat… ESPN is impressively agnostic about where to put it best stuff, sharing ad-free video clips on Snapchat; tweeting its long feature pieces days before the magazine slips into mail boxes; and making an infinity of videos, podcasts, articles, and other forms of content free on its website and in other forms. And all this from the network that can charge cable operators and satellite TV companies the highest rate in the industry, thanks to its exclusive offerings. ESPN has never been more expensive to “buy” as a television station, nor more abundantly cheap to consume online. .. In a way, ESPN is confronting the slow unbundling of television by unbundling itself—treating its own site, plus Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and phone alerts, as separate channels, each with their own appropriate programming and tone.