As the world of TV crumbles, what does the future hold for ESPN?

The Disney CEO also noted that 83% of all multichannel households turned to ESPN in the first quarter of this year, and that 96% of all sports programming is watched live, which he called “particularly valuable in today’s rapidly changing advertising marketplace.”
One of the things that makes ESPN very different from other streaming success stories such as HBO and Netflix is that the sports broadcaster’s content has an extremely short half-life. Netflix may not mind paying hundreds of millions of dollars for a TV show because it knows it can rebroadcast and license that content forever, but ESPN’s library consists of things that only have value for a few hours.
On the one hand, this short life-span is the channel’s biggest strength: When a major sporting event is taking place, people want to see it right away, and they are willing to pay handsomely for that ability. But if competitive pressure continues to increase, that life-span could become a serious weakness.
http://fortune.com/2015/08/05/espn-future/