However, the price will definitely be around $50.
Part of the reason is that news outlets like CNBC and the Wall Street Journal have spoken with officials from the streamer owners (Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox) who have set starting prices in that range. There is a particular thing.
But it's also due to basic logic. When companies that own sports streamers sell their programming to other pay-TV services, they charge a wholesale fee, or “carriage fee” in industry parlance, for each channel included in a pay-TV bundle. And they have to do the same thing here for the same price.
If you add up the price of all the channels included in the new streamer, it's only about $30. $29.35 to be exact, S&P Global Ratings' Naveen Sarma says in a new report. Add to this the overhead/operating costs. Keep in mind that the new company will have to launch a new national streaming service, market it to new consumers, and then work to retain those customers. Several You get some sort of profit…that makes it very easy to get to the $50 retail price even if you pass it on.
(Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at Lightshed Partners, suggested streamer costs could be even higher than S&P estimates.)
Here's a breakdown of costs by channel:
At this point, we realized that the majority of that cost was coming from Disney. Revenue from Disney comes in at nearly $11 per subscriber on ESPN alone and nearly $3.50 on ABC. plus 5 channels left.
This will give you an idea of how much Disney will have to charge for its standalone ESPN service, which it says will launch in the fall of 2025. But first let's see how this looks.
