We research all brands listed and may earn a fee from our partners. Research and financial considerations may influence how brands are displayed. Not all brands are included. Learn more.

  1. Lifestyle
  2. TV

Most Cable Subscribers Would Dump ESPN to Save $8 a Month

By: Brad Tuttle
Brad Tuttle, expert in Personal finance, shopping, consumer trends, and Senior Editor at Money
Brad Tuttle
Senior Editor | Joined January 2014
Brad Tuttle is a senior editor at Money with over 10 years’ experience covering a vast number of personal finance topics, including careers, cars, travel, budgeting, investing, insurance, credit cards, consumer psychology, real estate, banking, and shopping and deals.
See full bio
Published: Jan 14, 2016 2 min read

Over the last two years, ESPN has lost 7 million subscribers, mostly by way of people cutting the cord and canceling their pay TV packages entirely. After all, despite the uptick in options for personalized viewing packages, the TV bundle is very much still alive, and the options remain severely limited for picking and choosing only the channels one wants to pay for.

In other words, for most people, the only way to get rid of ESPN—which is by far the priciest cable channel, costing each subscriber roughly $6 per month in 2014 and more than $8 by 2018—is to cancel your pay TV package, period.

But what if viewers had the option of just dumping ESPN to save that $8 a month? As the Washington Post noted, this is exactly the question posed recently in a survey by BTIG Research.

The results show that 56% of respondents would indeed forgo ESPN and ESPN2 from their pay TV packages if the tradeoff was a monthly bill that's $8 cheaper. Unsurprisingly, women were more likely than men to happily unload ESPN to save some cash, at a rate of 60% versus 49%.

“Even more interesting, results did not vary by age, with Millennials, Gen X’ers and Boomers all similar, adjusting for the survey’s margin of error,” BTIG Research’s Richard Greenfield wrote in regard to the survey.