ESPN+ Loses 700k Subscribers with Exclusive Window for UFC Negotiations Under Way

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ESPN+ ended 2024 by losing 700,000 subscribers as the streaming service continues to struggle to maintain growth over a longer period of time. The loss in subscribers comes just as the exclusive negotiating window with the UFC on a new broadcast rights deal started in January.

On Wednesday, Disney released financial information for the fourth quarter in 2024 with ESPN+ losing three percent of subscribers, which totaled out to 700,000. ESPN+ now boasts 24.9 million subscribers overall. Disney’s entire sports division, which is led by ESPN, saw revenue stay flat quarter over quarter at $4.85 billion, but the segment operating income reversed from a loss in the same period in 2023 to a gain of $247 million in 2024.

It’s still a tough trend for ESPN+, especially after the streaming service enjoyed consistent periods of growth after first launching before running into tougher times in recent years. Back in May 2024, ESPN+ saw a loss in overall subscribers in three out of four quarters with the total number of subscribers sitting at 24.8 million.

ESPN+ currently sits a little higher at 24.9 million, but that’s not a huge amount of growth year to year, not to mention ESPN is also planning on launching a new streaming service by Fall 2025 that features the network’s flagship linear channels such as ESPN and ESPN2.

While the UFC airs across all of the ESPN family of networks, the majority of the promotion’s content lives on ESPN+.

“The goal all along with ESPN is to make it as accessible as possible, and in as many ways as possible,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said during a financial call with investors Wednesday. “Some will want to consume it just through an app, some as part of the more traditional expanded basic bundle, and some will migrate in the direction of skinnier bundles, or sports bundles only. We plan to take advantage of the emergence of these bundles.”

ESPN+ struggling to find significant growth undoubtedly becomes a concern as the UFC prepares to embark on a new broadcast rights deal. The MMA promotion has an exclusive deal with ESPN that runs through the end of 2025.

As it stands, ESPN maintains exclusive negotiating rights with the UFC through April 15, but it’s highly unlikely the two sides reach a new deal before that window closes. After that April 15 deadline, other potential suitors can get involved in the bidding and then the UFC can decide where the next broadcast deal lands.

Major players like Netflix and Amazon are rumored to get involved with the UFC reportedly seeking over $1 billion per year for the new broadcast rights deal.

Netflix, which no longer plans to reveal subscriber numbers in 2025, closed out this past year with more than 301 million subscribers — an addition of 13.12 million subscribers from the third quarter to the fourth quarter in the year. Netflix also recently inked a massive five-year, $10 billion deal for the rights to WWE’s flagship series Monday Night Raw.

That deal was negotiated by TKO Group Holdings’ CEO Ari Emanuel and company president and chief operating officer Mark Shapiro — the same people expected to handle UFC negotiations this year.

If they can sign up One Championship, I’d sign up for that.

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Things are starting to get heated between ESPN and UFC as their exclusive negotiation window narrows for a new broadcast deal in 2026.

UFC signed with the worldwide leader in sports back in 2018 for a blistering $800 million a year, and for a while it seemed like everything was great. The combat sports promotion drove subscribers to ESPN+, which became the exclusive home in the United States for nearly all UFC events and pay-per-views. UFC got the ESPN rub, which involved a lot of promotional push across the entire corporate network.

But with UFC looking to bag a new deal worth a billion per year and ESPN limping into 2025 a money loser for Disney, we’re looking at what appears to be a slow-moving break up. And that was before ESPN+ s—t the bed (again) a week ago, resulting in few people being able to buy UFC 313.

The New York Post’s Erich Richter posted an article talking about how UFC brass were ‘furious’ that the event was hobbled by technical difficulties. And now he’s on a NY Post Sports podcast giving more context to the relationship between ESPN and UFC.

“ESPN has pretty much stopped putting UFC programming on cable TV, whether that be ABC, ESPN2, ESPN,” Richter said. “If ESPN isn’t putting UFC on their cable broadcast, I feel like that is indicative of how they feel about each other right now.”

That dissatisfaction comes from pay-per-view numbers being ‘way, way down.’

“The UFC gets [paid] 300,000 pay-per-view buys as a ‘buy in’ from ESPN,” Richter explained. “There’s no way that ESPN is getting 300,000 pay-per-view buys out out of every pay-per-view, from what I was told. So this has been a bad marriage in the last couple years for both parties. UFC is frustrated that the technology that ESPN [uses] is not up to speed yet, and ESPN is frustrated because they’re not getting the pay-per-view buys that they had expected.”

Yes, there’s something to be said for the middling PPV cards the UFC has been delivering since they no longer have to worry about how many units each one sells. But ESPN+ has a well-earned reputation as a terrible service which will swallow your payment and not even give you access to the event you just bought. It will stutter and die and jank out just as bad as an illegal stream.

So if you’re a fan, where’s the incentive to pay 80 dollars to a company that won’t even help you (and definitely won’t refund you) if their service stops working?

Fortunately for the UFC, they have a bigger, better suitor waiting in the wings: Netflix. The streaming giant recently signed a massive $5 billion deal with WWE, also owned by UFC parent company TKO. According to Erich Richter, all signs point to a similar deal for their MMA product.

“When I put that article out on Sunday night, I got a call from somebody who’s pretty well connected,” he said. “And he said, ‘Almost definitely Netflix.’”

“Now where it gets interesting is Netflix is seemingly unwilling at this point to dive into the pay per view model. Mark Shapiro had said that they’re willing to be flexible, and that’s, when it comes to the pay per view model, it works for them is what they said, but they said they’re willing to be flexible.”

Netflix doesn’t have to get into the pay-per-view business because they’re already in the tier business. Over the years, their ‘one subscription fits all’ model changed to eliminate password-sharing, and then stratified into lower resolution and higher resolution tiers. Now there’s Standard with Ads ($7.99), Standard ($17.99), and Premium ($24.99).

It doesn’t take a business degree to anticipate how Netflix could split the UFC’s programming up: put the weekly events on Standard with Ads and the pay-per-views on Premium.

But that’s just speculation on our part at this point. The main takeaway from this reporting? ESPN and UFC are starting to duke it out in public as each attempts to gain leverage coming into April, which marks the end of their exclusive negotiation period.

ESPN is cooked but they’re also not getting the PPV buys they thought they would get.

This is what you get when you cannot produce a functional app.

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