LUKE THOMAS: ESPN+ Is THE WORST Streaming Service in SPORTS

Luke Thomas: After YEARS of frustration TRYING to watch UFC and boxing events on ESPN+ as a customer, I’ve had enough. UFC 301 was not only completely inaccessible, but so might any future pay-per-view event if ESPN doesn’t do something to fix a service that balance sheets, consumer surveys and a mountain of anecdotal evidence shows is completely BROKEN.

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ESPN plus sucks and everyone hates it that is obviously my opinion but I bet for many and potentially the majority of you watching that’s been your feeling as well and even if it isn’t I bet I can show you that in fact ESPN plus sucks let’s talk about how much ESPN plus sucks my will to live first let’s start with the Pepsi challenge in the comments below leave your experiences using the service I know that some folks have had no problems God bless them but way more have had an awful experience like the kinds I am accustomed to so I want to hear about them below second I say all of this not as Combat Sports media but as a customer I know it’s not fully possible to disentangle the two but my complaints are entirely and exclusively from my experiences as an ESPN plus consumer I’ll bring wider facts to corroborate my case as you’ll see but the core of my issues are from the service I’ve experienced as a customer and I have every right to share the truth of them and I intend to in this video the basic fact is this I’ve experienced Myriad issues with ESPN plus over the years mostly in the form of various kinds of inoperability unless I engage in Relentless troubleshooting in every occasion where the service is used but in the end I typically have made it work in short I am used to the product being difficult but not completely unreliable that has all change now with UFC 301 on May 4th the problem reached a breaking point I couldn’t watch at all I paid for the pay-per-view tried every possible troubleshooting angle I could access later reached out to customer service on multiple platforms and literally nothing helped as I speak to you right now I still haven’t watched UFC 301 on ESPN plus I’m not here to judge anyone who Pirates streams but generally speaking I prefer to pay and I tried to do this with ESPN plus and it literally did not matter ESPN can be considered a premium brand which makes this entire context bath I like a lot of ESPN produced shows I like their Sports content I have friends who work there and they do a great job ESPN is supposed to be the worldwide leader in sports that’s what they call themselves so how is it possible a premium brand like ESPN can be responsible for the worst product in all of sports streaming and how can the same company also have a product this notoriously bad while also having completely ineffective Customer Support I’m going to make an argument about ESPN plus and then I’ll do my best to justify it with evidence but it goes something like this ESPN or Disney simply don’t care if ESPN plus is bad either it’s a sunk cost and they don’t want to bother updating it or they think because they’re they’re the rights holders consumers have no choice or maybe they believe one of the new bundles that they’re going to be a part of will bail them out I don’t know I cannot speak to their motivations what I can say is the notion they don’t know there are problems very much strains cred and therefore the lack of real initiative to do anything about them gives you a decent sense of what their genuine priorities actually are let’s dig into the details but start with my ESPN plus experience that kind of summarizes everything I call it all for show nothing for go after tagging them on Twitter for their multiple failures the ESPN plus help account finally responded and then asked me to DM them so they could offer help I wrote to them this politely and professionally and thank them for reaching out so you might ask how did they respond they didn’t as of the time of this publication they still haven’t they publicly told me that they’d helped me and then they privately did nothing ladies and gentlemen that is the ESPN plus experience it looks like something but jump through a few hoops and you’ll just discover it’s really a lot of nothing ESPN plus is hemorrhaging money at scale that means the service lost $65 million this quarter alone reports indicate the average monthly Revenue per ESPN plus user has decreased from $564 to $545 they have approximately 25 million subscribers but like many other streaming services it has not been able to capture the scale necessary through churn to make money and in fact despite four years of continuous subscriber growth ESPN plus Subs recently dropped for the second straight quarter and then the third time in four quarters Disney who owns ESPN reported they were only $18 million shy of streaming profitability but it’s also only ESPN plus that is causing them problems together Hulu and Disney plus made 47 million this past quarter it’s ESPN Plus’s losses that set the entire thing back but we don’t have to focus just on the balance sheets there’s consumer data to indicate why ESPN plus sucks so much in 2023 cabletv.com did a survey on consumer streaming satisfaction and continuously ESPN plus produced either High negatives or ranked near the bottom in virtually every category that matters respondents noted ESPN plus did not meet expectations found it one of the most difficult to even basically use noted it was one of the least enjoyable experiences and also voted along with the then HBO Max app as one of the least reliable streaming services other ESPN plus subscribers noted its relatively low con conentration of original content lack of value for the price and low likelihood to be recommended to others just look at where it ranks on all of these satisfaction measurement lists and it’s consistently or almost universally at or near the bottom of every single one there isn’t a metric that I can find where ESPN plus excels except brand recognizability but ESPN plus being total crap doesn’t exactly help ESPN Plus’s brand image as an MMA fan I can tested this being true without even referencing UFC 301 for example the search service is terrible and clunky if you want to look up a fighter or their resume the process is also convoluted from ESPN plus you have to visit a fight or event page on espn.com only to then be sent back to ESPN plus although the redirect often goes to the Spanish language or grank family secondary broadcast and even then it’s usually not even to the specific fight instead it’s to the of the fight card where that bout took place you then have to manually find where that fight is and if you start skipping around on ESPN plus get ready for all kinds of lags later on in the Stream and this is just the tip of the iceberg I don’t love doon’s value proposition for customers but their user interface and overall product functionality is infinitely better ppv domcom a relatively new entrant to the space works every time I’ve ever used it with no issue the basic truth appears to be it is totally implausible a company this well capitalized with other streaming services performing well in the same parent company isn’t aware of the disparity between them and the show that is ESPN plus you can see it in surveys balance sheets and as it turns out from the pain and frustration of customers desperately trying to make a broken product work I tried to purchase UFC 301 on May 4th the day of the pay-per-view and was never able to watch not then not now not ever I tried purchasing the event on my PC through my Chrome browser using my American Express card this is the exact process I’ve used for years same computer same card same browser same process and no amount of troubleshooting worked I logged out of my account and logged back in nothing I went to my subscriptions page and then came back nothing I in fact changed browsers nothing cleared caches nothing deleted and reinstalled browsers nothing I even changed computers nothing despite paying for UFC 301 I was never actually able to use ESPN plus to watch it for my job and it didn’t just fail in real time the UFC 301 broadcast never worked not one time since that date it says a lot about a company’s priorities when the technology to process Financial transactions Works flawlessly but the product driving those transactions doesn’t the following day I spent an hour on the phone with a customer service agent and I want to be clear the agent herself was kind and doing her best I’m not complaining about a customer service agent tasked with an impossible job but the fact remains there’s nothing that will allow even a well-intentioned employee and customer service agent to fix a broken product by themselves so after trying every single remedy she had to offer yes nothing worked we went down her troubleshooting list and all of it failed so out of answers she ultimately tells me this would probably work better if I simply bought UFC pay-per-views on my TV or watch them on my phone lady with all due respect the entire reason we’re having this phone call is because I’m not watching on my phone and by the way I bought the UFC 300 pay-per-view on my TV and I was able to watch it in my living room but I need the service in my office on my computer and there are notorious issues going from pay-per-views bought on your TV to another device and none of that even matters ESPN says their pay-per-view service will work in the very conditions under which I’ve been using them and through which I bought this pay-per-view in the first place it is absurd to ask customers to watch $85 events on their phones when you’re still selling them as accessible on PCS through web browsers note to ESPN plus Executives if you’re Broad don’t reliably work on computer browsers stop selling them there eventually the agent told me my problem would be worked on and then to try again tomorrow there are other details about this call like how my payment method couldn’t be identified for the first 45 minutes of it despite it always being the same in the process having always been the same and that also still doesn’t even address that I’ve now been told to try watching a Pay-Per-View event on the following Monday after it didn’t work live on a Saturday 48 hours too late but did the UFC 301 event ever play later on any of my computers nothing I eventually asked American Express to wipe the charge from my account after explaining what happened they did and I’ve been refunded the $85 but after this experience I’m left with far more questions than I am answers how the hell am I supposed to legally watch UFC 302 or any other pay-per-view the service offers I was never able to get UFC 301 to work no one at ES PN plus was either why should I expect my UFC 302 experience to be any different also how can Executives moan about the deleterious effects of piracy in a world where customers can’t even watch pay-per-views that they have purchased if you actually want to combat piracy you can’t offer a product decidedly less functional than one being provided by a server somewhere in the former Soviet block pay-per-view decom Works Doone works even fight TV Works in any head-to-head test I’ve ever been a part of ESPN plus can’t even match triller level technology and if all of that isn’t bad enough ESPN plus can’t even be bothered to create a functioning customer service backend that repairs the innumerable bad experiences it is responsible for creating so while I cannot mind read about the executives in charge of ESPN plus it is hard to imagine how anyone can look at the anecdotal evidence or larger and more substantive data about consumer sentiment and think the folks in charge care deeply about getting any of this right the broader reality is ESPN is launching a standalone service for ESPN proper at some point in 2025 and as it stands ESPN plus is mostly overflow content or stuff on demand or pay-per-view they’ve also announced participation in a bundle with Fox Sports and Warner Brothers Discovery that’s supposed to shake up the industry they’re calling that venue I can only guess but maybe the reason those in charge of ESPN plus seem to care so little is they believe I don’t know Disney or Hulu will bail them out or ESPN Standalone services will take over all of their streaming needs or they’ll Sunset the service eventually or they’ll make enough on this fox and Warner Brothers bundle to not even care maybe they also know as the rights holders UFC customers don’t have any other legal choice so we’re just expected to deal with it I don’t know but what I can say is the requisite efforts necessary to make ESPN plus more than a disaster for customers does not appear to be on the horizon from every indication that I have seen ESPN plus has sucked will continue to suck going forward and nothing observable from my vantage point is being done to address it I’ve seen calls to blame UFC but what can they do they’re locked into these deals and in their defense they likely assumed competent stewardship of ESPN a premier brand having their streaming initiatives all locked up and dialed in but I do at least hope they take into consideration experiences like mine and yours as they think about their next broadcast partner I know they won’t care about a media figure not getting what he wanted but to the best of my approximation as a consumer the evidence shows I am not alone and that’s true not only on May 4th when there were numerous complaints about ESPN plus to service failing customers like me but it’s also true now ESPN plus sucks and deserves the scorn it has brought upon itself