Last fall, there was an LG TV that taunted me every time I walked into Costco. I read the reviews. The reviews were great. I bought the TV. Everything has worked out well with one exception. You cannot download the ESPN Plus app on the TV, and that is still the case today. So why, what’s happening here?
Well, at first I thought I was missing something until I read and I found out you really can’t download. the ESPN plus app on this smart TV, which doesn’t make any sense because LG is a huge brand. This is the latest in TVs. The ESPN plus app is established. Many people desire to have this app and I wanted it because it was the only way that I could watch UFC events.
So there are workarounds for this. You can screen mirror, you can use an Apple TV, you can use a Roku, but it’s really stupid that if I have the latest smart TV. I can’t download the ESPN plus app. So I started to look into this and on Reddit, the common, the common theory is that basically Disney ESPN hasn’t submitted their app to LG.
But I don’t think this is the case. So really the two main reasons here are there’s no licensing agreement in place. So ESPN plus they could have an agreement with other smart tv manufacturers and not LG or they just may have made not made a deal with LG. Or there could be a technical compatibility problem where ESPN doesn’t want to dedicate the resources to develop and maintain this native app for LG TVs.
But I don’t think that’s the case, because LG is a significant player in the smart TV market. The number one player is Samsung, and so ESPN supports Samsung smart TVs. And if you really, if you have a model from 2016 on up, then it’s probably going to be supported as long as it’s using the Tizen operating system.
But the reason I think there’s more to this than the technical side is because of a, a really what looks like a press release. Issued by Vizio and in this press release it states with our expanded relationship with Disney Vizio audiences can now enjoy the ESPN app ESPN plus the Disney bundle trio, etc So that that statement right there makes me think that there is some kind of standoff between LG and Disney slash ESPN to where LG cannot get the app.
I think my speculation is that Disney wants there to be some type of compensation for their app being on LG TVs and LG is not giving into that. And so the other major player here is Sony. So the big three in the smart TV market are Samsung, Sony, and LG. And especially when it comes to the the premium TV market where you’re looking at 2, 500 and up, it really comes down to LG, Samsung, and Sony.
And LG is number two. So LG has a large market share. It doesn’t make sense why ESPN wouldn’t spend the, the the technical capital to get their app in the, in the app store. But there could, I think there’s a hang up. In some kind of compensation or money deal, and that’s why LG TVs don’t have the ESPN plus app available, but.
The other part of this is, is that neither LG nor Disney has come out with any statement addressing this. And, and that’s strange to me. That’s, to me, that’s something that LG should acknowledge. They probably don’t want to. They probably want people to buy the TV and not worry about that. Of workarounds, but really a smart TV, a new smart TV, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to download the ESPN Plus app.