Flagship we hardly knew ye.
Flagship is the handle ESPN has used for about a year now to refer to its developing and highly anticipated direct to consumer app, which will for the first time make all of ESPN’s channels available for standalone sale. Next week ESPN will retire the placesetter flagship and replace it with the real thing.
“If you are a subscriber of linear ESPN, you will automatically get what I know we’ve been referring to as ESPN flagship,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said on an earnings call this morning. “By the way, it will not be called that, and next week, Jimmy Pitaro (ESPN president) plans to reveal not only the name, but he’ll also talk about it, our pricing strategy. But the plan would be to basically be somewhat agnostic from a subscriber perspective, so that we can still do our best to preserve the multi channel ecosystem.”
Disney’s upfront is scheduled for May 13, so that is likely the platform for the announcement.
The soon-not-to-be-named flagship app is expected to cost between $25 and $30 a month, and is touted as boasting features like betting and fantasy integration not available to the linear consumer. That price would place the new ESPN app in the higher range of sports app prices, though definitely not exorbitant. Iger did not mention a launch date, though it is widely expected sometime before the start of the college football and NFL regular seasons.
For years ESPN had resisted a DTC offering for fear it would cannibalize the linear channels. And ESPN is seen as critical to holding the fraying cable bundle together. If consumers who just get cable for ESPN drop it now in favor of the app, that could be a death blow to linear.
Last year when Disney worked with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery to get their sports streaming app off the ground, they all said that the app would not cannibalize pay TV. But internal research that emerged during litigation suggested a much stronger bleed of customers from pay TV to the app. The three partners dropped plans for the app in the face of litigation brought by FuboTV.
Therefore one of the most highly watched developments of the next year to 18 months in media is if the ESPN launch accelerates the decline of the cable bundle.
ESPN’s existing streaming option, ESPN+, which shows live sports not available on ESPN’s linear channels, saw a 800,000 subscriber loss to 24.1 million in the quarter ended March 29, 2025. ESPN revenue for the quarter rose 8 percent to $4.5 billion, according to Disney. But operating income fell 16 percent to $669 million.
“The decrease in domestic ESPN operating results in the current quarter compared to the prior-year quarter reflected… higher programming and production costs primarily attributable to airing three additional College Football Playoff (CFP) games as well as one additional NFL game due to timing,” the company wrote in its quarterly report.
Disney shares were up 10 percent in early morning trading as the company also reported an unexpected rise in Disney + subscribers. Disney reported a 1.4 million increase to 126 million for Disney+, the inverse of Wall Street’s expected decline in subs.
Disney expects to announce pricing for its highly anticipated direct to consumer ESPN app, which the company is expected to launch before the start of the college football and NFL regular seasons.
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