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Today is a watershed day in American sports-watching. For the first time, you can legally watch the country’s top sports channel without also paying for truTV, TLC, Bravo, Court TV, and the like. In fact, the day literally has a name, as certified by the National Day Archives: Happy National ESPN App Day to you and yours. (It should be harder to get a national day.)

That may sound like a lot of fanfare, but ESPN’s new direct-to-consumer service has launched with much less of a circus than a media industry watcher might have expected one, three, even five years ago. That’s because ESPN is releasing a revolutionary new project that it doesn’t really want you t

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