ESPN To Lay Off Hundreds Of Employees Amidst Budget Cut

According to several reports, media giant ESPN is attempting to cut between one and two hundred million dollars from it's budget by 2017.

The company appears to be operating under direct orders from the hierarchy at Disney and will now be forced to vacate two or three hundred jobs as a result.  ESPN President John Skipper began this process of trimming the budget by releasing highly priced talent such as Bill Simmons, Keith Olbermann, and Colin Cowherd.  It is now however apparent that the budget cut was a lot bigger than just on air talent.

This news comes in the wake of reports that ESPN would be ending a series of graphics known as cover alerts.  Cover alerts inform viewers of the sports gambling implications of a game.  ESPN and other networks have been more open to the idea of sports gambling recently.  Much of that has to do with DraftKings and FanDuel becoming leaders in the market and becoming business partners with ESPN and other sports channels.  Despite the fact that these companies claim to be only daily fantasy sites and not actual gambling sites, which is a different discussion.

Gambling is a major discussion in the sports industry at the moment, but it now it appears that a potentially larger issue for networks might be actual television subscriptions.  With the rise in entertainment availability on the internet more and more people have resorted to ending their cable subscriptions in order to save money.  There are millions of absent subscribers evaporating the normal income of the networks, and unfortunately that means that less jobs will be available at cable networks.