Drawing bye-byes

ESPN’s May subscriber flight fouler

It’s another bad month for ESPN.

New data show the Disney flagship sports channel losing 3.8 percent of its subscribers in May, as cable cord cutters continue to defect to streaming video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

ESPN’s attrition rate is nearly a third higher than the median drop of 2.9 percent for cable channel subscriber losses during May, according to Nielsen’s latest estimates based on its viewing panel.

The channel has been spending big on sports broadcasting rights, and lately fresh evidence has surfaced that subscriber losses are eroding its ability to underwrite that strategy. Earlier this month, Disney said operating income at its Media Networks division, which includes ESPN, dropped 3 percent in the quarter ended April 1.

Nielsen’s latest stats do not include new ESPN subscribers to over-the-top services from the likes of Sling, Hulu and YouTube (among others), whose total subscriber base is around 1.3 million. In 2016, there were a total of 94.7 million pay-TV subscribers nationwide through cable, satellite and telecom distributors, according to SNL Kagan.

According to Nielsen, ESPN was in 86.9 million households as of May, down 3.3 percent from 89.8 percent a year earlier.

A source close to ESPN said the year-on-year numbers were down 2.7 percent, including over-the-top services, which have helped ESPN add about 200,000 subscribers during the past year.

An ESPN spokeswoman declined to comment.

The statistical breakdown comes from Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser, who notes that May’s drop in payTV subscribers came despite the fact that the overall number of TV-watching households actually grew by 1.7 percent.

“The gap … [is] part of a generally more negative period of time than any other for which we have data back to 2010,” Wieser wrote.

Among the worst hit in May were Time Warner’s Boomerang channel, which lost 9.6 percent of subscribers.