2) Rebrand ESPNEWS as ESPN3
ESPNEWS is a fossil on the Bristol landscape that has outgrown its original mission and purpose from long ago. ESPN has already committed to showing live events on ESPNEWS from college football to basketball to preseason NBA action and plenty of other events in between. Right now ESPNEWS is basically ESPN Radio simulcasts, studio show re-airs, and some episodes of SportsCenter sprinkled between live events. It hasn’t really been ESPNEWS for a long time. In fact, it’s long past time ESPN did something different with the former 24/7 news channel.
ESPN should go all-in and rebrand ESPNEWS as ESPN3 and bring us one step closer to the ocho. (In this scenario, ESPN3 would be re-rebranded as ESPN360 for the digital platform once again.) The current digital version of ESPN3 is one of the greatest treasure troves of live sports anywhere. Why not bring the best of the best of those rights to television? We’re talking about everything from college football to cricket to rugby to soccer and pretty much every sport you could ever dream of watching.
ESPN has so many live sports that a true ESPN3 television channel makes a lot of sense at this point in time. And with the pessimism about ESPN’s future growth bringing doom and gloom on Wall Street, an aggressive rebrand like this would signal ESPN’s intent to do more than just circle the wagons. ESPN3 could keep the ESPN Radio simulcasts but focus on the live sports rights the network has that may not get a lot of run-time on ESPN or ESPN2. It could also take ESPN back to its roots and show some more non-traditional things like arm wrestling or eSports. Maybe ESPN can even bring back Larry Beil and sumo wrestling. ESPN already has the two biggest sports networks in all of cable television… why not go for the top three?