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Home > Celestial Blood > Breaking down Disney’s bold strategy for ESPN (à la carte)
Podcast: Celestial Blood
Episode:

Breaking down Disney’s bold strategy for ESPN (à la carte)
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-08-08 21:30:00
Description: Disney is making aggressive moves in sports media, with ESPN set to launch as a standalone app at $30 a month. The company also announced a $1.6 billion deal for WWE and a $3 billion agreement giving the NFL a stake in ESPN—a move that raises questions about editorial independence and faces scrutiny from a Trump-led Justice Department. Also, with the Paramount-Skydance deal closed, are the Ellisons looking to buy Warner Bros. ? Kim Masters and Matt Belloni break it all down. A whole new ball game? Disney is set to launch ESPN as a standalone streaming service, priced at $30 a month. The announcement arrives with a flurry of deals and acquisitions in the sports world. “They're going to pay $1.6 billion to WWE, taking it away from Peacock. It had been a $900 million deal for Peacock. It's now a $1.6 billion deal, which shows you that these properties are just soaring in value,” Masters notes. “But the biggest one is this mega NFL deal in which they are going to give the National Football League a 10% stake in ESPN… in exchange for control of NFL Network and NFL RedZone. That's a $3 billion-ish agreement.” Unsportsmanlike? With the NFL poised to take a stake in ESPN, questions are swirling about the network’s journalistic independence. “Bob Iger says it's not going to change their journalism. ESPN has already treated the NFL with kid gloves. I mean, they are one of their most important league partners” Belloni clarifies. “But the interesting thing here is the regulatory aspect of this, because ESPN is selling a 10% stake, so the Department of Justice will have to bless this. ESPN may be walking into another buzz saw here where Trump could get involved and start demanding things.” Monopoly Men? Following the closure of the Skydance-Paramount deal, insiders have reason to believe that the Ellisons are setting their sights on acquiring Warner Bros. “I don't think that it will happen right away,” says Belloni. “Warners has to split first, where they're gonna separate the TV assets from the studio and streamer. But once that happens, I mean, Warner's has been positioning itself for a sale for a while now, with all the cost cutting and trying to get the studio in order to try to make itself an attractive acquisition target, and the Ellisons, I think, realize that Paramount is not scaled—even with tech money or with all the things that they say they are going to do to this company.”
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