I would be happy to pay for ESPN on my Roku exactly as I do HBO Now. $10/month max, cancel anytime. I would subscribe for NFL season only and quit right after. Otherwise, I use HD antenna for local games and the occasional streaming website for a game I really want to see. I really don't care for their commentary.[0]
ESPN pays out an insane amount of cash for their deals with various sports leagues. Their business model completely relies on people who don't watch the channel to still pay them, and seem to be locked into that business model. If people who only watched ESPN paid ESPN, some estimates put the required monthly fee to be around $40/month. It's insane. They rode the gravy train for a long time, but don't seem to have an escape hatch.
The average might be $2m, but the median is only ~$750k. So if you flatten the payscale then you could probably get to a $500k average with most players not taking too big a paycut.
But let's say you are 15 year old super talents that has every potential to make many millions in the NFL today. Would they still pursue football if they could only make at most 25% of the highest paid players today or would they focus on another sport, and if so which sport might do better in this future? Perhaps baseball or soccer will become more popular since if you're not getting paid a lot why risk the head trauma.
If you take the quarterbacks and the absurdly over-paid edge rushers out of the equation, and the NFL average salary starts to come down quite a bit closer to that 500k mark.
Some would argue that that bit of economics is part of what is diluting the product on the field. There is little incentive to keep mid-career, mid-talent guys around, when you can use guys on rookie contracts that are half or a quarter the price, for 75% of the skill. Except there's a lot of deficit in experience and savviness.
Here is Bob Iger's response (Disney's CEO) to where streaming ESPN is headed (1)
Q: Some people have been thinking this new streaming service will offer a flat rate, roughly the $6 or $7 a month that customers pay on their cable bill to get ESPN. Is that right?
A: It’s not going to be that way at all. There will be really variable pricing and multiple packages to consumers. People may just want to subscribe during the football season. Or maybe they want to pay just for a summer, just for a weekend, just for a game. We will have customization and personalization. I think everything ultimately will be on an à la carte basis; a lot of people may subscribe to the whole thing and get a discount for that.
Considering how much money pay per view sporting events are able to charge, there is probably a lot of upside to the price. This could be a lot like movie theater tickets where the viewership plummets, but the audience that remains is paying 4x what they used to for the same thing.
You can basically do this with SlingTV. The $20 Orange package is basically ESPN, Disney, and a few throw-ins. That's probably the cheapest way available to legitimately get ESPN.
To actually watch most NFL games, though, you would need some kind of a subscription that gets local CBS, NBC and Fox channels, though. ESPN only carries Monday Night Football.
$10/m if there are no ads. It should be free if they are going to bombard us with ads. With online streaming they can do targeted ads and make more money compared to running stuff on cable or over the air.
[0] http://www.espn.com/video/clip?id=17823563