ESPN's Greatest Threat? Income Inequality?

Derek Thompson:

When John Skipper, the president of ESPN, wants to worry about the future of the most valuable media company in the world -- not just think anxiously, but actively worry -- he doesn't focus on Google trying to buy exclusive rights to the NFL. He doesn't think about Apple going head-to-head with the cable companies. He doesn't think about CBS, or NBC, or FS1. If there's any acronym that truly scares him, it's CBO.
Yep. John Skipper thinks about income distribution tables.
The statistic that frightens him the most, he told a group of reporters in Bristol yesterday (which he also told me in a previous interview), is that the bottom 20 percent of American households still makes less than $15,000. And the poorest households are seeing the slowest wage growth in the country.
That's a problem, because ESPN and other networks are selling a mass product, the cable bundle, whose price has tripled in the last decade and a half. And the number-one driver of rising cable costs today are the sports rights that make ESPN so valuable. The cost of exclusive rights to show sports are growing about 7% annually through the rest of the decade, 4X faster than private sector compensation growth (graph below via RBC/click to expand)

Why is that such a problem for them?:

But Skipper is persuaded that if more Americans were simply making a little more money, there would be no fraught discussion about cord-cutters and cable-nevers. "The real issue is economics," he said. "Most of the cord-cutting has been financial." Not only does the bottom quintile make less than 15,000 a year, as Skipper often points out, but also about a third of households make less than $30,000 in after-tax income, according to the Tax Policy Center's distributional analysis.
"ESPN is a mass product," he said. Wage stagnation threatens to make it a luxury product.

It is good that some folks in big business are starting to notice this problem.   In the end, the one industry that makes a ton of money based on so many people struggling to get by, and the one with the most politicians bought, is the finance industry.  They love to extract fees from the people who can least afford it, and those are also ones who have to borrow money.  I hope that enough businessmen who need consumers are able to realize that workers need to get a larger share of the profits of their labor.