Ch. 2 - Strategic Planning for a Competitive Advantage

ESPN is the superstar of the sports broadcasting world.  Among being the leading cable channel for sports broadcasting, it reaches over 97 million US homes with their abundance of channels.  Including, ESPN, ESPN2(sports events and news) and ESPN Classic(historical sports footage).  ESPN also creates original programming for TV and radio and lends content for ESPN.com(which is operated by Disney Online), arguably one of the most popular sports websites on the internet.  ESPN's international operations extend the ESPN brand to another 190 countries world wide. Due to these reasons ESPN popularity makes them a force to be reckoned with, establishing celebrity status!

To reach this status, ESPN had worked tirelessly to extend its power and influence the sports and entertainment network.  It holds broadcasting contracts with Major League Baseball (MLB), National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), NASCAR, Major League Soccer (MLS), Major League Lacrosse, Arena Football League and many college sports conferences.

ESPN took over Monday Night Football, other than the playoffs and Superbowl, the NFL's most prestigious event from ABC in 2006.  ABC lost roughly $150 million dollars a year on the venerable program.  ESPN pays the NFL $1.1 billion dollars a year(for eight years) to the NFL to broadcast Monday Night Football.  ABC also turned over its sports programming network(ABC Sports) to ESPN, which now airs all its games under the ESPN banner.  These are just the "tip of the ice berg" to ESPN's strategic planning to keep a competitive advantage over their industry of sports programming.

All of ESPN's products and operations consist of;

• ESPN (sporting events and news channel)
• ESPN Classic (archival sports footabe channel)
• ESPN Deportes (Spanish-language sports network)
• ESPN Enterprises (new business venture development)
• ESPN HD (high-definition channel)
• ESPN International
• ESPN On Demand (video on demand programming)
• ESPN Radio
• ESPN The Magazine (print magazine)
• ESPN2 (sporting events and news channel)
• ESPN2HD (high-definition channel)
• ESPNEWS (24-hour sports news channel)
• ESPNU (college sports)
• ESPYs (annual award show)

This covers the brand of ESPN, take notice of how the company completely covers all aspects of sports and all medians used to reach any and all sport fans.  They leave no stone unturned, a vital component for ESPN's competitive advantage.  

To go a little further into detail, ESPN's top competitors in the sports programming network are, CBS, Fox Entertainment and NBC.  Quite frankly, none of these competitors even remotely come close to covering all the medians that ESPN covers for the sports world.  Again, a huge reason for ESPN's competitive's edge.

In conclusion, the monopoly known as ESPN, strategic planning for competitive advantage is to simply to cover ALL medians possible in the sporting world.  A hostile take over my eyes!  Try to compete with that CBS, Fox and NBC.

I'd like to give a special thanks to Hoovers who provided a detailed company profile report on ESPN, which can be found here;
Hoover's ESPN profile report