Forget the Disney angle. Disney is focused on making Disney+ and Hulu profitable and doesn’t have time for ESPN. And I mean, 300k subscribers is a fifth of a percent of Disney’s subscriber base. So they raise fees $3 a month and basically keep their subscriber rate steady? At 150M subscribers that’s a half billion extra per month in revenue. Win! By the way, you know one reason Disney+ has been losing subscribers very recently? They lost the rights to the Indian Premier Cricket League. Honestly, they lost 2.4M subscribers for that. Hugely popular in India. (Massive market size over there btw…). Live sports is massively important…. Anyway, the same way the SEC and B1G are fighting for powerful brands to add to their conference lineup, ESPN and Fox are fighting for the best sports content to keep them as market leaders as cord cutting makes this shift to streaming a necessity. ESPN has to have something that people will pay to watch. This is why ESPN isn’t paying the Pac12 $300M a year for a single late night slot of west coast content. They are removing that from their books and shifting it to the SEC. This is also why ESPN is probably super hot for the ACC to add Stanford and Cal to get a handful of late night content back on their schedule at a minimum of money. FSU, Clemson and UNC have basically said “No, you need to show us the money if you want that”. The Stanford/Cal thing isn’t over for this reason. FSU still wants money more than anything. If ESPN greases FSU and UNC’s palms enough, this will happen. In the process of buying up the SEC, ESPN got outbid for the B1G by Fox, (who also overpaid for the B1G) but this also means that ESPN’s money is now primarily focused on the SEC and ACC instead of those two + B1G and Pac12 as well. So they are getting leaner and more focused but buying a large amount of content and locking it in. It takes a big investment to do that.