Sports fans will have to wait a bit longer for that ESPN live streaming service.

Last month, when Walt Disney Co. said it would acquire a 33% stake in BAMTech for $1 billion, Disney CEO Robert Iger said that a likely result would be a straight-to-consumer streaming ESPN service by the end of the year.

But speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia investors conference in New York Wednesday, Iger shifted that launch date to sometime in 2017. The service, he said, would be complimentary to the current ESPN networks and could offer live coverage of specific sports and tournaments. "Let’s look at it as an add-on product, not a product that is a substitute product for ESPN, the mother ship," Iger said.

Subscribers would be able to get coverage of specific sports on a streaming service across various streaming platforms including mobile devices, he said. "We’re not doing this though because we think that the current business model is in any way crumbling," Iger said. "We’re doing it because we think we have more opportunity to reach more sports fans and we’re also doing it because we can’t predict right now where the business goes over time."

Tech and video streaming company BAMTech was separated from Major League Baseball's digital entity MLB Advanced Media as part of the Disney transaction in August. Iger noted that BAMTech supplied the live streaming technology for Twitter's Thursday Night Football broadcast on the social network last week.

 

Source : usatoday.com

Report Abuse