ESPN+ Drops 400K Customers Following Football Season, Ends Fiscal Q2 2024 With 24.8M Subscribers
The subscriber dip is not unexpected, although the previous two corresponding quarters did see subscriber growth.
Is the beginning of the end of ESPN+ in sight? The streamer faces a lot of existential questions these days, but few answers were available in Tuesday’s quarterly earnings report from Disney. The report detailed that in the first three months of 2024, ESPN+ lost 400,000 subscribers, now totaling 24.8. At the end of Disney’s fiscal first quarter, ESPN+ had 25.2 million subscribers. Declines for sports-specific and live TV streaming services are anticipated during the first three months of each calendar year with the conclusion of the college football and NFL seasons.
The company’s flagship streamer Disney+ added 7.9 million domestic customers during the quarter, bringing its new total to 153.6 million. Its general entertainment streamer Hulu also added half a million new subscribers, raising its overall customer base to 50.2 million, its largest total in service history.
ESPN+ saw a 3% increase in its average revenue per user (ARPU) during the previous quarter, rising from $6.09 at the end of December 2023 to $6.30 at the end of March. Despite the end of the football seasons, this is the first time that ESPN+ has seen a subscriber decline at the end of its second fiscal quarter.
What’s New with ESPN+?
January through March were highly consequential months for ESPN+, but unfortunately, they were most consequential because they featured several news stories that could signal that ESPN+ is on its way to the streaming scrap heap.
In the first week of February, Disney announced that it was sending all of its sports rights to a joint venture streaming platform with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery. The new platform will include ESPN+’s content, though the streamer will presumably remain a standalone service to give viewers a lower-cost option to watch its live games and shoulder programming without having to subscribe to the JV, which will likely cost around $50 per month.
In April, more details about Disney's plan to create a new, standalone ESPN streaming service in 2025 were reported. The company plans to offer all sports available on its linear family of ESPN channels on a streaming add-on within Disney+, though there’s no confirmation yet on whether it will be offered outside Disney+ as a standalone platform. Once this product is available, however, there seems to be little sense in continuing to offer it alongside ESPN+ as opposed to merging all the content of both services.
It could be months before there’s clarity on the future of ESPN+, but one thing we know for sure is that the streamer will be limiting the sharing of passwords starting this summer. In February, Disney updated the user agreements for all of its streaming services to make account sharing an official violation, and will roll out paid sharing options as well as begin enforcing rules against password sharing this summer.
ESPN+
ESPN+ is a live TV streaming service that gives access to thousands of live sporting events, original shows like Peyton’s Place, the entire library of 30 for 30, E:60, The Last Dance, as well exclusive written analysis from top ESPN insiders. Sports available on ESPN+ include NFL, MLB, NHL, UFC, College Football, F1, Bundesliga, PGA Tour, La Liga, and more.