Walt Disney Co. (DIS) may have a blockbuster hit on its hands with the live remake of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” but when it  comes to its EPSN network it continues to struggle.

That was the major takeaway from Disney’s fiscal second quarter earnings results which it offered up to Wall Street after the close of trading Tuesday. While Disney was able to post a profit for the last quarter of $1.50 a share, surpassing the analyst consensus for earnings of $1.41 a share, revenue in its cable division which includes ESPN came in at $4.1 billion, lower than the $4.2 billion analysts were looking for, according to Bloomberg. Profit in the unit dipped 3 percent in the fiscal second quarter. Disney said ESPN continued to lose subscribers during the quarter while at the same time it had to pay higher programming costs which weighed on results. Revenue for the fiscal second quarter was $13.3 billion, slightly lower than what Wall Street was looking for.

For some time now investors and Wall Street analysts have been seemingly obsessed with Disney’s ESPN and the struggles the sports network has faced over the years. Since 2014 speculation has abounded about Disney selling ESPN, taking it public or doing nothing at all. More recently Disney has been engaging in cost cutting at ESPN including laying off a slew of journalists and on air talent in April. The layoffs included high profile talent at the sports network such as former N.F.L. players Trent Dilfer and Danny Kanell, the former N.B.A. player Len Elmore, the former baseball general manager Jim Bowden and the longtime N.F.L. reporter Ed Werder, reported the New York Times at the time. While ESPN is still the leader in sports media, it has been hurt over the past few years from a decline in viewership as new ways to consume live sports are popping up all over the Internet. According to the New York Times ESPN has lost more than 10 million subscribers over the course of the past few years. At the same time that it is seeing a decline in subscribers, the cost to broadcast sporting events is getting pricier for ESPN. For instance ESPN signed an eight year extension deal with the NFL in 2011 that costs it $15.2 billion. It also paying $12 billion for a deal with the NBA and $7.3 billion to air the college football playoffs.

For Disney the troubles at ESPN comes at a time when consumers are increasingly cutting the cord and are shunning cable television, choosing to access their content online whether through a streaming content service or from social media networks like Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR). Even Amazon (AMZN) is getting into the game, recently winning the rights to live stream NFL’s Thursday night games starting in September. Under the deal, Amazon will live stream ten Thursday night games per season, making the games available to Amazon Prime customers online. Amazon is paying $50 million for the streaming rights which is five times more than the $10 million Twitter paid last year to stream Thursday night NFL games.

 When ESPN announced the layoffs in late April, John Skipper, the president of  ESPN, acknowledged the changing viewing habits of consumers, particularly millennials, telling employees that ESPN has a long track record of navigating changes in technology and fan behavior and this is no different. “Today, we are again focused on a strategic vision that will propel our vast array of networks and services forward. A necessary component of managing change involves constantly evaluating how we best utilize all of our resources, and that sometimes involves difficult decisions,” he wrote. The executive said ESPN’s content strategy in which it melds SportsCenter TV editions with digital-only offerings still needs to “go further, faster…and as always, must be efficient and nimble.” Disney has already announced plans to launch an over-the-top ESPN streaming service that will be similar to Netflix.

During an earnings call late Tuesday Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger told analysts and investors there are no plans to offer a version of ESPN online to non-paying cable subscribers but acknowledge it may have to do so in the future. He did point to the fact that ESPN is already part of streaming services like Hulu and YouTube but it’s not enough to stem the decline in cable viewers.