Sprint TV losing ESPN

[jamesinclair]

I loaded up the Sprint TV app to watch the World Cup Draw today. I was met with a notice that ESPN and Disney would be gone on 1/1/14.

 

Thats a huge loss for me. I don't have cable so the app was of much use to me. I use it for college football and soccer.

 

It's an especially huge loss with the world cup coming up.

 

Anyone know what happened? Did someone else buy up ESPN rights? Is Sprint replacing it with something else?

[koiulpoi]

The communication I received on it simply said the contract was expiring, and due to the high cost of these networks, they won't be renewing. ABC, CBS, and NBC are also going away.

[menecer]

I loaded up the Sprint TV app to watch the World Cup Draw today. I was met with a notice that ESPN and Disney would be gone on 1/1/14.

 

Thats a huge loss for me. I don't have cable so the app was of much use to me. I use it for college football and soccer.

 

It's an especially huge loss with the world cup coming up.

 

Anyone know what happened? Did someone else buy up ESPN rights? Is Sprint replacing it with something else?

espn has there own app that you can use to watch live tv and it is free

 

Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk

 

 

[CrimsonKnightDX]

That is fine, since with most Cable/SAT providers, you can use the ESPN App to get this content. I only wish Sprint would carry the NFL Mobile App again with NFL Red Zone and NFL Network.   Would be nice if they could strike an exclusive deal with MLB too.

[CAREND]

That is fine, since with most Cable/SAT providers, you can use the ESPN App to get this content. I only wish Sprint would carry the NFL Mobile App again with NFL Red Zone and NFL Network.   Would be nice if they could strike an exclusive deal with MLB too.

 

I just wished the at bat app had the mlb network streaming on it.  or if i could find internet streams for the One, that would be great.

[centermedic]

Sprint TV always had a lot of potential. They just dropped the ball.

[gifters]

That is fine, since with most Cable/SAT providers, you can use the ESPN App to get this content. I only wish Sprint would carry the NFL Mobile App again with NFL Red Zone and NFL Network.   Would be nice if they could strike an exclusive deal with MLB too.

 

The NFL is dead to me, They won't allow Daniel Defense to run a commercial during the super bowl...

[lafester]

Wow they might as well shut down sprint tv at this point.

[jamesinclair]

espn has there own app that you can use to watch live tv and it is free

 

Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk

 

 

 

That is fine, since with most Cable/SAT providers, you can use the ESPN App to get this content

 

 

If you have cable.

 

As I said, I don't. So it's not fine, for me.

 

 

Sprint TV always had a lot of potential. They just dropped the ball.

 

Yup, whenever someone saw me using it they were always impressed.

[WiWavelength]

Sprint TV always had a lot of potential. They just dropped the ball.

 

Or, as a member with actual knowledge of the internal situation already commented in this thread, the expense was too great.  These broadcasters -- whether OTA or cable -- are increasingly requesting exorbitant sums for carriage of their feeds.  Put the blame where it lies...

 

AJ

[mc_gusto]

Wow kinda forgot about that app. Just downloaded it again. Not bad. Much better quality than the last time I tried it.

 

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[jonathanm1978]

I hate these carrier fights that cause me to lose channels. Just recently, dish took down our NBC local for nearly two months, and ran their propaganda about the network being the reason....Charlie seems worse than dick(direct) ever was, the amc outage on dish made headlines. And hitting home most recently, they completely took down g4, now I am strictly limited to online resources for gaming shows.

 

 

Actually I'm thinking when my current sub is up, I'll cut the cord and do Roku and ps4 streaming only. Roku had me in a beta with their newest box, which the beta lasted a couple months but they really took effort in supporting their boxes.

Sent from my LG-LS980 using Tapatalk

 

[centermedic]

Or, as a member with actual knowledge of the internal situation already commented in this thread, the expense was too great.  These broadcasters -- whether OTA or cable -- are increasingly requesting exorbitant sums for carriage of their feeds.  Put the blame where it lies...

 

AJ

Not disagreeing with the cost issue. Its just that Sprint TV always seemed like a half hearted effort to me.

[hescominsoon]

That is fine, since with most Cable/SAT providers, you can use the ESPN App to get this content. I only wish Sprint would carry the NFL Mobile App again with NFL Red Zone and NFL Network.   Would be nice if they could strike an exclusive deal with MLB too.

you can get nfl mobile from the play store...it is NOT a verizon exclusive.

[newboyx]

you can get nfl mobile from the play store...it is NOT a verizon exclusive.

But you only get the good stuff if you are a VZW customer.

 

Sent from my LG G2.

 

 

[CrimsonKnightDX]

you can get nfl mobile from the play store...it is NOT a verizon exclusive.

Of course. The app is also available in the App Store , but not being a vzw customer, you don't get the red zone channel or Thursday night foot ball. No live NFL stream.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone 5s using Tapatalk

[jamesinclair]

Watching the MLS Final on my phone right now.

[richy]

Or, as a member with actual knowledge of the internal situation already commented in this thread, the expense was too great.  These broadcasters -- whether OTA or cable -- are increasingly requesting exorbitant sums for carriage of their feeds.  Put the blame where it lies...

 

AJ

I went through a fun process at a cable company I worked for in another country whereby a large competitor who we also bought channels from decided to play silly buggers with their pricing and the same may be occuring here. Basically when a 'channel owner' signs a contract they may give the content away for free (and it be supported by commercials alone) or even pay a fee for it to be carried (shopping networks, TV gambling etc) but for more popular channels with expensive content (like say Fox) they require payment. This payment generally has two aspects, a per viewer figure and a minimum spend which is the gotcha. What we found what the channel owner offered a modest reduction (~10%) in the carriage fee per user but wanted to more than double the minimum contract value which unless we could double the sales (and given it was in the base package that wasn't happening unless we got 120% market penetration) we were seriously out of pocket and we turned down their kind offer and spent the money elsewhere. The other company went to the press and whined that they cut the cost, we whined they raised it, and both were true and false in their own way. It's also a way of saving face and not looking like the bad guy, cut the per sub cost but bump the minimum and you can say you made it cheaper even though the reality is it will cost more. 

 

So how does that affect Sprint TV. When I had it, Sprint TV was actually pretty darn cool. Yes channels were limited and you had to buy some of them, but it was essentially free. The problem arises when networks want more money. We haven't any idea how much sprint actually budgeted per person for licensing content, probably not more than a dollar or two a month, if that. That doesn't buy much when many channel packages cost more than that per month and it can be tough to get them unbundled into individual channels. It's likely ESPN figured it could make more money taking it away from sprint and using it's own app and have more control. Sad but true. Plus sprint tv is probably suffering a lot of competition from hulu, netflix, cbs et al, perhaps the viewing figures simply didn't justify the increased cost? 

[chappo2000]

I'm waiting for Aereo to come to the DC market. It's only for the broadcast networks, but it still looks like a neat concept.

 

https://www.aereo.com/

 

Pending it's legality, of course.

 

I've been a sprint customer for ten years and I've never tried Sprint TV. Sounds like it could have been my loss. I never liked that it required a network connection.

[BenChase7]

 

I've been a sprint customer for ten years and I've never tried Sprint TV. Sounds like it could have been my loss. I never liked that it required a network connection.

By network connection, do you mean native Sprint 3G/4G connection?  If so, that is not true.  Sprint has allowed access to SprintTV via WiFi for quite sometime. 

[JeffDTD]

Sprint TV was a way to help upsell data, when it was difficult to convince customers they needed a data plan and also when Hesse brought us "everything" and increased prices. No one joins, keeps, or leaves sprint for sprint tv today. Im happy sprint will spend the money elsewhere

 

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[chappo2000]

By network connection, do you mean native Sprint 3G/4G connection?  If so, that is not true.  Sprint has allowed access to SprintTV via WiFi for quite sometime. 

 

Yeah, that's what I was referring to.

 

See? I figured I was missing something.....   I doubt I'm the only one that hasn't given the application much of a chance to impress.

[jp1992]

It gets added to the list of products I would have used if I knew existed. 

[travismheim]

I used to use Sprint TV a lot when I had my first phone (Samsung SPH-A900) back in 2006-2007. I was pretty happy with the service back then with the tiny screen but when I got my first smartphone I lost interest because of added capabilities on the new phone. I had forgotten about the service until a couple of months ago when I got a Sprint Zone alert/spam/ad and gave it a try. It still worked pretty well but I didn't find myself using it much. It seems like it would be near worthless with the loss of those providers but It's understandable with how much they want to jack up the price to broadcast their content.

[CrimsonKnightDX]

I used to use Sprint TV a lot when I had my first phone (Samsung SPH-A900) back in 2006-2007. I was pretty happy with the service back then with the tiny screen but when I got my first smartphone I lost interest because of added capabilities on the new phone. I had forgotten about the service until a couple of months ago when I got a Sprint Zone alert/spam/ad and gave it a try. It still worked pretty well but I didn't find myself using it much. It seems like it would be near worthless with the loss of those providers but It's understandable with how much they want to jack up the price to broadcast their content.

 

 

 

Exactly, and now that money instead can be used to roll out NV and Spark.