The Walt Disney Company’s sports network ESPN said its digital apps logged some of the highest traffic in the company’s history this weekend, driven by intense interest in the opening weekend of the National Football League’s season, college football games and the concluding matches of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.
On Sunday, ESPN Digital — which includes the ESPN website and associated apps — logged 41.7 million unique visitors, a 5 percent year-over increase and setting a record for daily traffic. The ESPN Fantasy App had 11 million unique visitors that day, the company affirmed, citing data from Adobe Analytics. Metrics for the ESPN app itself were not disclosed.
The preceding day also saw immense traffic, ESPN said, with ESPN Digital logging 40.5 million unique visitors on Saturday — the third-highest daily traffic count. Separately, the ESPN app had 15.7 million unique visitors — 12 percent higher compared to last year — while the ESPN Fantasy app had 7.1 million visitors, a year-over increase of 29 percent.
Overall, ESPN said it reached 82.2 million unique sports fans across its digital platforms and apps last weekend.
The ESPN app offers access to the brand’s highly-sought original journalism, sports scores, stats and interactive TV listings that point sports fans to live games airing on ESPN’s networks and a handful of third party channels and platforms. The ESPN app for phones, tablets and smart TVs also hosts content from ESPN Plus, Disney’s standalone sports-inclusive streaming service, which is separate from the ESPN cable TV multiplex.
Cable and satellite subscribers can watch ESPN’s pay TV channels through the app when they authenticate their subscription using a login and password. For the moment, that excludes customers of DirecTV and U-Verse (formerly AT&T U-Verse), who have not had access to ESPN and other Disney-owned channels since September 1. A programming-related dispute is keeping the channels from those subscribers, and the situation looks like it will not be resolved anytime soon.
