REUTERS/Michelle McLoughlin
A broadcast studio at Digital Center 2, a new 194,000 sq. ft building on the ESPN campus in Bristol, Connecticut May 22, 2014
During an earnings conference call in August, Disney CEO Bob Iger said that ESPN had "experienced some modest [subscriber] losses" because of an overall decline in multichannel cable subscriptions in US households.
A regulatory filing submitted Wednesday evening and cited by The Hollywood Reporter indicates the losses are much greater.
ESPN networks now have 92 million subscribers, according to THR. It was 95 million last year and 99 million in 2013.
The seven-million-subscriber loss potentially amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost annual revenue.
The cable industry at large has suffered a kind of exodus over the past few years, as TV streaming and over-the-top services multiply and consumers find ways to either trim down their cable subscriptions or, in some cases, cut them altogether.