Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Audio / Video
  3. News

ESPN’s standalone subscription could hit $30, receive preference on Roku

Phil Nickinson
By
The ESPN app featured on Roku.
ESPN reportedly has been in talks with Roku about its upcoming standalone streaming option being a featured app on the home screen. Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends

While the super sports streaming service that combines ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery events remains in a holding pattern for now (that’ll change soon enough), a little more news about ESPN’s upcoming standalone streaming service is starting to trickle out.

We’d take all this with some skepticism considering that the service won’t be available until sometime in 2025, and a lot can change by then. Citing unnamed sources in a piece titled “ESPN is open for business,” The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand writes that the standalone ESPN subscription — which would be a true direct-to-consumer (DTC) service and would not require an existing subscription to cable or an online-based service like YouTube TV — is targeting a monthly price between $25 and $30.

Recommended Videos

That’s a big deal because it would theoretically get you the full ESPN experience — every live show and every live sport that’s available now on streaming and cable — for one-third to 40% of the cost of a live TV streaming service. (That varies a little depending on the service.) And you wouldn’t be saddled with dozens of other channels that you might not ever want to watch.

Related

And while that wouldn’t certainly wouldn’t cover every live sporting event available today, combine the standalone ESPN subscription with an over-the-air antenna and you’d have a compelling (and relatively low-cost) option. And at the end of the day, it’s really all about choice. One of the things that drives up streaming subscription prices are the fees networks charge the distributors. Marchand notes that ESPN costs $10 per subscriber as part of a cable bundle, and those subscribers have to pay for it whether or not they watch ESPN. Same goes for other channels, like Fox News. A standalone ESPN subscription would make eschewing cable or streaming bundles that much more possible, and make lower-cost options like Philo (which has far fewer channels) more palatable.

It’s also not yet known if the standalone subscription would include ESPN+, which is separate from ESPN proper and offers additional on-demand shows, as well as far more live sports than could ever fit on the linear ESPN properties.

Also in the piece, Marchand notes that ESPN is in talks with Roku to “offer the new DTC service as one of its tiles when viewers turn on televisions.” He notes that ESPN also has had (presumably) similar talks with Amazon and Apple, though that could all mean different things. Apple TV, for example, doesn’t currently allow for third-party preloaded bloatware. (The Apple TV ESPN app does, however, support automatic login if you supply your existing cable or streaming credentials.) Or perhaps it was referring to Apple TV, the app, and how ESPN could have a place in it alongside Apple TV’s own MLS Season Pass option, which doesn’t compete with ESPN since the latter lost the rights to MLS matches in 2023.

But money talks, so we’ll just have to see what eventually comes to fruition. And in any case, we still have a long way to go until this standalone subscription option is available.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Phil Nickinson
Phil Nickinson
Section Editor, Audio/Video
Phil spent the 2000s making newspapers with the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal, the 2010s with Android Central and then the…
Don’t like giant ads on Amazon Fire TV? Then don’t buy one
A promo for a show on Amazon Freevee.

Oh, no! A full-screen promotion for a service on the platform you basically got for free! Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends

There’s been a little bit of a kerfuffle of late regarding Amazon Fire TV and advertising. Not that it has ads on the home screen, mind you. That’s not exactly new. But, rather, that you’re getting pushed onto a full-screen promo when coming out of sleep mode because you’re landing right atop the featured carousel, which in turns triggers the full-screen ad. Previously, you’d have to click up into the carousel for it to expand.

Read more
ESPN+: Live sports and more you can’t get anywhere else
ESPN+ app on a movile device.

ESPN is synonymous with sports on TV. It stands to reason, then, that ESPN+ gets you more sports. And it does, in that newfangled way that transcends sports on TV. ESPN+ is the future of ESPN in a streaming world. Probably. Eventually. Sort of.

It's a little complicated. It's perhaps better at the moment to consider ESPN+ the streaming service complementary to ESPN the cable network. You can get some of what's on ESPN on ESPN+. But at the same time, ESPN Plus has a lot that you can't get on the cable network.

Read more
Everyone is missing the point on streaming video
App icons on the Apple TV homescreen.

Yes, there are a million ways to watch streaming video. And that's the way it should be. Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends

There's a tremendous amount of gnashing of teeth anytime a streaming service increases its prices. There's a scramble by media outlets to update SEO-friendly posts and quickly offer alternatives, as if this was all a zero-sum game and you're able to watch the same things on all the services. Or maybe it's time to go back to cable altogether because streaming video is just too darn expensive and it's too hard to find what you want to watch. We're in one of those times in which it feels like all the services are increasing all the prices, to the extent that Engadget has plainly asked "Is streaming even still worth it?"

Read more