• Sports betting is big. ESPN is the biggest brand in sports. • But ESPN couldn't use its brand to make headway in the sports betting market. • So now it's working with DraftKings — one of the two biggest players in sports betting — instead.

Less than a year after launching its own sports-betting brand, Disney is walking away — but not from sports betting.

Instead, Disney is replacing Penn Entertainment, the regional gambling company it teamed up with to launch "ESPN Bet," with DraftKings, one of the two dominant sports-betting companies.

In practice, that means that starting next month, ESPN will direct viewers who want to bet on sports to DraftKings, instead of the ESPN-branded app that Penn operated. Disney says ESPN Bet will live on as a "content brand," meaning a TV show and "s

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