Sports fans typically feast on the long Thanksgiving weekend but the news has been anything but yummy for Walt Disney shareholders.<br />Disney's stock was down 3.26% to $114.80 Friday morning, after the media conglomerate revealed late Wednesday in regulatory filings that ESPN's subscriber base has plummeted to 92 million as of Oct. 3.<br />That's down from 95 million just a little over a year earlier.<br />The venerable sports network has traditionally been a major profit generator for Disney, with fans still driven to watch sporting events in real time such as Monday Night Football.<br />But live sports programming is expensive to produce.<br />And an increasing number of cord cutters are ditching pricey cable subscriptions and turning instead to a la carte options, available through streaming services and smartphone apps.
