Via Flickr user adriansnood.
Via Flickr user adriansnood.

ESPN wants to sell a-la-carte live sports content — without requiring a cable subscription — as early as February.

Recode reports this morning that ESPN is planning to sell streaming video subscriptions for the Cricket World Cup early next year, marking the first time the cable giant has sold access to its live feeds to non-cable TV subscribers.

Pricing details are scant at this point, but this follows a report from the Wall Street Journal last month that hinted at ESPN’s plans for an online service that will stream live regular season NBA games to fans without requiring a paid TV subscription.

ESPN already streams live games via its WatchESPN app, but only to those that already pay for access to a TV feed of ESPN.

An a-la-carte standalone model would be a significant change for ESPN, but in some ways make sense given how more and more people are opting to stream live sporting events. ESPN set numerous streaming records this summer during the World Cup, while the Super Bowl last year was most-watched live stream of a single sports event in history with an average of 528,000 viewers accessing FOX’s free stream of the game and 1.1 million concurrent viewers at one point.

Meanwhile, ESPN is dominating the digital sports arena, as the company announced last week that it reached 89 million unique users across its digital properties in October — 50 million exclusively on mobile — which was up 22 percent from this time last year.

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