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Later this year, you'll finally be able to subscribe to ESPN without paying for other cable TV channels.
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The new service will be called ESPN and cost $30 a month.
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The fact that Disney, which owns ESPN, has taken a decade to launch this tells you a lot about the state of the TV industry.
Here's a scenario: You don't pay for cable TV, but you love sports. And you hear that ESPN will now let you buy a streaming version of the sports channel. So you sign up, for $30 a month.
And here's an alternate scenario: You pay upward of $100 a month for cable TV, but you're really only doing that so you can watch sports. So when stand-alone ESPN comes along, you drop your cable subscription and move to ESPN's $30-a-month plan.
Both of these scenarios are good for ESPN's owner, Disney. Either way, the company gets a monthly subscription fee from you.
But for now, Disney has to maintain in public that it's really interested in the first scenario.
"Our priority is looking at the 60 million-plus people that are on the sidelines," ESPN's boss, Jimmy Pitaro, said at a launch event Tuesday morning — referring to the pool of people who don't have a TV subscription.
But the truth is that both ESPN and the rest of the TV industry know there are people who might stop getting cable TV once they can just get ESPN. Which means they know the new service could help speed up the erosion of the cable TV industry.
And that also explains why this launch announcement — the service itself will come online sometime in late summer, in time for the NFL season — is taking place in 2025. Even though there's been intense speculation for a decade about a streaming-only version of ESPN.
That's because Disney, along with other TV network operators, has spent years trying to keep a foot in each canoe: offering some of its best programming on digital-only services like Disney+ and ESPN+, while keeping other core offerings on its traditional networks, like ABC and ESPN.
Because while old-time TV networks are fading away, they still generate meaningful revenue and profits for Disney and every other cable TV owner.
So in 2015, when Disney CEO Bob Iger first freaked out the industry by acknowledging ESPN's subscription base was starting to shrink, the company was loath to move to an ESPN-only option.
Fast-forward to the present: It's now commonplace for big cable channels like HBO to sell their programming as stand-alone streaming services. And the companies that own traditional cable channels are trying to figure out how to get rid of most of them. See, for instance, Comcast's plans to jettison most of its cable properties into a separate company, and Warner Bros. Discovery maneuvering so it can do the same.