20 Aug ESPN Believes a New App Will Save the Company [The Hollywood Reporter]
BY STEVEN ZEITCHIK
August 20, 2025 | The ESPN personality Mike Greenberg was feeling the excitement. Standing at a downtown Manhattan studio on Tuesday, one of the most famous members of the masochistic cult known as New York Jets fandom had just been told by the network’s top tech execs about a personalized AI version of ESPN’s flagship show.
“Can we have one version of a personalized Sports Center where the Jets win the Super Bowl?” he asked. “I’ve never seen it happen. Maybe AI can make the impossible come true.”
ESPN has a problem. Most commonly that’s expressed as a shrinking number of cable viewers and the lowered subscription and ad revenue that comes with it. But really it’s a cultural problem: a generation raised on pro sports as a participatory activity, with social media and video games and fantasy play, sees little need for ESPN’s top-down, big-personality, appointment-viewing brand of content.
So technology has arrived, as it so often does lately, to save the day. Maybe. On Thursday an ambitious new ESPN streaming app will take flight, but carefully, so as not to unravel the still-formidable revenue that comes from everything outside it. When it launches, the $29.99/month service will offer access to all 47,000 of the network’s annual live events, all its studio shows and all its 30 for 30 and other library content — pretty much anything ESPN ever has aired or ever will air. In the brief history of phone applications, perhaps no product has ever given us that much professional video in our pockets.
Toss in a $39.99 bundle with Fox One (like all of these pricey but still cheaper than a cable subscription) and another bundle with the NFL Network that includes Red Zone (the latter launches just before the season next month), and sports content will soon be burning up your phone’s motherboard.