Call It Kevin Martin Day: ESPN Goes a la Carte
Competition Achieved What Republican FCC Chairman Attempted Through Bureaucratic Pressure
ESPN: Shall we call today Kevin Martin Day? A generation ago, Martin was the Republican Chairman of the FCC from 2005 to 2009. For years, he tortured the cable industry because he wanted to see expensive channels like ESPN sold a la carte to take cost pressure off the beefy bundle. Martin, despite taking punitive steps against cable, was no match for the D.C. cable lobby in a pre-Netflix era when programmers and big MSOs were never more united. But in a sense, Martin got the last laugh: Today, Disney is launching ESPN as an a la carte app for $29.99 a month. In addition to fleeing their cable and satellite TV providers, the ESPN app will allow fans to gorge on more than 47,000 live events each year from the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NHL, college football, tennis, golf and other sports.
Today’s launch will reportedly be a bumpy ride. “Full authorization remains unavailable through select cable providers as ESPN resolves outstanding negotiations, meaning some cable subscribers will be unable to access content broadcast exclusively on the streaming service. Such content will be initially unavailable to customers of Comcast Xfinity, YouTube TV, Dish Network, Sling TV and Cox,” ABC News reported.
Martin had allies in the a la carte war. Within the pay-TV industry, ACA Connects (née American Cable Association) supported a wholesale a la carte approach, giving cable operators the right to acquire channels one by one and assemble their own packages. “For years our members fought alongside their customers to win wholesale choice over the channels they watched, and they were right then, just as they are now. Broadband and streaming have given them the choices they always wanted. With ESPN going a la carte today, the final nail in the cable bundling coffin has been driven in,” said retired ACAC President and CEO Matthew M. Polka.
On Capitol Hill, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), author of the Television Consumer Freedom Act of 2013, wanted consumers to be able to buy channels or the cable bundle. He also tried regulatory incentives to get a la carte, such as cable operator exemptions from local franchising requirements. McCain died in 2018. What would McCain say if he were around to see ESPN ripped from the cable bundle. “If Sen. McCain was alive, he would be pleased to see that Disney is finally offering this option to consumers − albeit about 20 years late. The Senator would always say that ‘the little old lady living in Sun City who never watches sports content should not have to pay for this content or subsidize my ability to watch sports content.’ And I have to believe he is smiling down from Heaven, while he is sitting on a cloud watching a Diamondbacks game or Sports Center,” said former McCain communications policy aide Lee Carosi Dunn.
No one fought McCain on a la carte harder than former Disney/ESPN lobbyist Preston Padden. “I am 100% sure Sen. McCain’s response would have been ‘$30 a month is too damn much,’” Padden said. “My wife and I now pay more for à la carte services than we ever paid for cable. The [NCTA - The Internet & Television Association] ad with a tagline ‘à la carte is French for expensive’ was spot on.”
Like Martin at the FCC, Capitol Hill efforts to impose cable a la carte fizzled. Cable Cowboy John Malone, who like Barack Obama just published his second biography, last September told MoffettNathanson Senior Managing Director Craig Moffett that cable should have gone a la carte a long time ago to combat the streamers, “In Dr. Malone’s view, ‘There shouldn't have been a Netflix,’” Moffett related.
Where is Kevin Martin today? He’s a D.C.-based Meta/Facebook executive busy trying to keep his CEO Mark Zuckerberg out of trouble. Trying. The latest Zuck fail: Meta AI chatbots have reportedly participated in romantic role-play and sexually explicit conversations with users who identified as underage.” If he ever gets that AI mess cleaned up, maybe they’ll call it the Kevin Martin Decade.
