ESPN+ gets another price bump on August 13

Shawn Knight

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Why it matters: If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that the upcoming college football season had a lot to do with ESPN’s timing. After a year where many sports were paused and others had abbreviated seasons, the worldwide leader in sports is no doubt looking to maximize revenue in the latter part of 2021.

Disney is raising the price of its ESPN+ streaming subscription service for the second time this year.

A spokesperson for ESPN+ confirmed to The Verge that the monthly rate will go from $6 to $7 starting August 13. Those on an annual billing rate, meanwhile, will see the price increase from $60 to $70.

Disney’s bundle, which includes access to Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, will remain unchanged at $13 per month. That’s still an excellent value, so long as you’d utilize each service. The cost of UFC pay-per-view events, which moved to ESPN’s platform exclusively a bit back, will also stay the same at $69.99.

As mentioned, this is the second time ESPN+ has seen a price bump in 2021. Early this year, the annual rate for ESPN+ jumped to $59.99.

Price hikes of this caliber are par for the course when it comes to streaming subscription services, but it’s a bit tougher to swallow when they are pushed so close together like this.

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Sports networks kinda painted themselves into a corner: Cable TV networks and channels basically had lots of individual shows to share around but with Sports, that broad reaching division of the different sports into physical regions or specific days of the week to cover isn't going to work well to launch a potential "Netflix of sports" since without cable TV, it's just really inconvenient to have no good way to have a single service with a reasonable amount of what you want to see: they designed it so that even if a sports fan follows a handful of teams other networks pick up the away games so nobody really *wants* multiple networks.

I know NFL has tried to pick up the slack but I rarely see a sports fan that follows a single team from a single sport, is kind of why the sports seasons don't completely overlap.

Yet I venture to guess that just dedicated sports fans aren't enough now that so many people are dropping cable tv altogether their numbers will keep going down.
 
Who cares? I never understood the fascination with watching OTHER people play sports. How about getting off the couch and playing some of those sports yourself instead of watching other people do it?
 
Who cares? I never understood the fascination with watching OTHER people play sports. How about getting off the couch and playing some of those sports yourself instead of watching other people do it?

Why watch the Olympics? Or anything for that. Why watch drama when you could just create it in your own house.

Jokes aside, you just don't get it. Maybe you are from a state or country that just doesn't have a competitive team. In Wisconsin our sport teams are pretty competitive. I can't stand playing basket ball but I'd watch the hell out of the Bucks any day of the week. I'm a pretty decent football player, but not even close to a professional.

Some people like to watch the best of the best duke it out. As someone that has kids, there is a big difference in a little league game and professional.

The whole streaming of Sports is a jumbled mess right now, and it isn't perfect on cable either. With games locked behind premium pay walls. Honestly there isn't enough Professional sports on ESPN to make it worth it to me. Too many games are featured on Fox, TNT, ABC, etc.
 
Dangerously close to pulling plug in Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu package. It will be permanent BTW. Greed and ĭm-pîr′ē-ə-lĭz″əm are intolerable as a one, two punch in our collective face. Yeah, need to get my own power walking on instead. Don't shoot the prior messenger who correctly says we need to get our families more active and involved in community sports, recreation. It's evident
 
Subscriptions In general don't offer enough for what they charge, so I dropped Netflix for Prime and YouTube Premium.

You need 3 subscriptions alone for all UFC fights. Just more of the same traditional scam with sports offering some games.

Movie and TV subscriptions fare better, but eventually we'll be looking for something cheaper and that option may not exist when, not if the time comes.
 
Agreed. Remember for many of us this premium-subscription-model is already on top of a hefty monthly cable bill that pays for soo much programming we certainly do not take advantage of, esp post pandemic. It's a wasteland of covid 19 social distancing compliant remote control production.
 
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Who cares? I never understood the fascination with watching OTHER people play sports. How about getting off the couch and playing some of those sports yourself instead of watching other people do it?
I don’t like watching sport either, it doesn’t mean I don’t empathise with people who do. Try seeing things from other people’s perspective rather than criticising what they enjoy, I bet you enjoy some things many sports fans don’t.
 
Don'y need ESPN+, in spite of the Olympics looming in the near future.

The only event I'm truly interested in, would be women's artistic gymnastics. Some of that will be on broadcast TV..

I'm even willing to sit through commercials for shyster personal injury law firms, online gambling apps, and even beer commercials, to see them.

(As long as the mute button on my TV remote is in good working order).
 
Dangerously close to pulling plug in Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu package. It will be permanent BTW. Greed and ĭm-pîr′ē-ə-lĭz″əm are intolerable as a one, two punch in our collective face. Yeah, need to get my own power walking on instead. Don't shoot the prior messenger who correctly says we need to get our families more active and involved in community sports, recreation. It's evident

"imperialism"????
 
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