The Real Challenge for ESPN

ESPN last week laid off 100 content-creating employees in a round of cost cuts. While cord-cutting has been widely blamed for the network’s troubles and the resulting layoffs, that’s a bit of an over-simplification. The real challenge is the traditional pay TV bundle is breaking apart and ESPN’s role as a must-have network is starting to crumble. I ran a survey on who watches ESPN last week and the results shed a little more light on the fundamental challenge for ESPN.

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Jan Dawson

Jan Dawson is Founder and Chief Analyst at Jackdaw Research, a technology research and consulting firm focused on consumer technology. During his sixteen years as a technology analyst, Jan has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. As such, he brings a unique perspective to the consumer technology space, pulling together insights on communications and content services, device hardware and software, and online services to provide big-picture market analysis and strategic advice to his clients. Jan has worked with many of the world’s largest operators, device and infrastructure vendors, online service providers and others to shape their strategies and help them understand the market. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Jan worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as Chief Telecoms Analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally.