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NHL’s Dallas Stars To Go Fully Free Streaming For Every Single Non-National Game Next Season
from the light-the-lamp dept
One of the drums upon which I’ve banged for many years now is the need for live sports to get its streaming shit together to actually deliver a great product to fans. Some leagues do this better than others, but decisions like this do tend to happen at the league level, rather than with individual teams. What that creates is a bunch of fractured ways sports fans have to consume live games.
By way of a personal example, I can share how it works for this baseball fan. I am a Chicago Cubs season ticket holder. With that, I get an included subscription to MLB.TV, baseball’s excellent streaming service. However, that service blacks out all games featuring local MLB teams, meaning I cannot use it to watch any Cubs or White Sox game, whether it’s a home or away game. Meanwhile, the Cubs launched their own network several years ago, called the Marquee Network. Marquee is not offered through YouTubeTV, to which our family subscribes. The result? I have season tickets to a team that I cannot watch on television without routing around the blackout rules, though I can watch all the other teams that I am not a fan of, so long as they’re not playing the Cubs or White Sox.
And while I’ve advocated for cord-cutting for years as well, it didn’t have to be the case that cord-cutting would somehow result in a bunch of fractured streaming services that all carry their own costs and whatnot. In fact, that is the exact sort of thing that pushed people to cut the cord in the first place. Teams could have easily setup their own streaming partnerships that didn’t carry any subscriptions and instead just replaced the practice of funding through advertisements with the cable or over-the-air carrier to funding through advertisements with the streaming carrier.
Don’t believe it can be that simple? Well, the Dallas Stars of the NHL have just proven you wrong.
The Dallas Stars announced today they have entered into a seven-year agreement with A Parent Media Co. Inc. (APMC) to stream all regional Dallas Stars games free of charge beginning with the 2024-25 season. The games will be broadcast on newly formed VICTORY+, a free direct to consumer streaming service created for fans by APMC with the Dallas Stars.
“After years of researching the right solution and careful planning with our partners at APMC, we’re proud to announce this pioneering streaming platform that will literally change the game for sports distribution on VICTORY+,” said Dallas Stars President and CEO Brad Alberts. “Our first priority has always been our fan base, and on VICTORY+ fans will be able to stream 100 percent of Stars content for free through this innovative and unique streaming platform for sports programming. Despite the mutual agreement between the Dallas Stars and Diamond Sports Group to end our current relationship pending court approval, we would like to acknowledge that we wouldn’t be here today without the partnership and commitment of Bally Sports and their staff over the past 25 years and thank them for their partnership.”
It isn’t overselling this to say that this really is a pioneering effort. This new streaming setup bypasses the Regional Sports Networks favored by so many pro sports teams, bypasses cable entirely, and bypasses the sort of paywalls that typically come with other streaming services. Instead, it takes live sports into the realm of over-the-air broadcasts, with all of the monetary support for the streaming partner coming in the form of advertisement sales against the broadcast. For Stars fans, it suddenly means that they can watch every regional game they want free of charge, other than dealing with the ads that are also all over cable and other streaming partners.
And that should mean that the Stars can cast a wider net and fuel an increase in interest in the team and its own fanbase. The VICTORY+ app will be available for smart TVs, phones, and computer streaming, as you’d expect. And the platform isn’t going cheap when it comes to its plans for production quality, either.
To ensure the highest level of production quality and fan experience, APMC has hired former FOX Sports Executive Producer and Dallas Stars Vice President of Broadcasting Jason Walsh to lead VICTORY+ to deliver the broadcast quality that Stars fans have come to expect. Walsh’s experience in production puts VICTORY+ in a unique position to take on additional teams and to scale VICTORY+ into the preferred destination for fans of the future.
APMC is also already talking about bringing additional sports teams into the fold. And they will likely have a decent amount of interest in that. If you’re not a follower of this industry, you may not be aware that the demise of RSNs on cable networks has been going on for several years now. Teams that have their own networks, such as the Cubs and Yankees in baseball, might be in very real trouble as cable carriers are rumored to be getting out of the RSN business entirely as a strategy.
Live sports may be getting a lot freer in the near future.
Filed Under: free, hockey, live streaming, sports, streaming
Companies: dallas stars, nhl
Comments on “NHL’s Dallas Stars To Go Fully Free Streaming For Every Single Non-National Game Next Season”
Marquee
The MLB.TV blackouts drive me nuts. At least the Cubs/Marquee have a cable-free streaming option now. Though the $20/mo price is probably my limit.
Also, the increasing number of cable/streaming network exclusive games is getting really frustrating. By the time I figure out that the game is somewhere else, I normally just give up on watching it.
Re:
And this is why we just pirate Orioles games now. It’s too expensive, too complicated, too just plain annoying to try to pay for them — which we did, as I explained in a comment last week. We were ready to pay a reasonable amount PROVIDED we could get every game but it turns out that not only is there no way to do that, there’s no way to even know which ones we’ll get. Which is insane.
Re: Re:
Just curious, who do you use?
Streameast is my generic go-to, but I’m more of an NHL guy. There’s a great Iranian pirate streaming site dedicated to NHL coverage, but I’m not familiar with what’s best for baseball.
Re:
Wow. That’s a hell of a lot of money for something they used to broadcast for free—excepting the local games, maybe. We paid 20 Canadian dollars a month for basic cable, which had like 20 or 30 channels, for the few months in my life when I subscribed (under protest).
Although Wikipedia does say there are 2,430 games per 6-month season, which seems shockingly high to me. At about 3 hours each, watching that could occupy all waking hours for a year.
I definitely can see APMC also talking with some leagues. Partly since it also has a major presence in Dallas, the one that jumped out at me first is Major League Rugby; it currently runs the subscription-based platform The Rugby Network.
https://www.majorleague.rugby
https://www.therugbynetwork.com
NHL Playoffs
My guess is that playoffs won’t be included. In Canada you need to subscribe to Sportsnet for $250. CBC offered select games in the first rounds that where on broadcast TV on their GEM streaming service. The last rounds where blacked out online. NHL’s YouTube channel had a live video blog with a panel describing the game, general banter and occasional live video. NHL completely killed the blog sometime during the 3rd round. Foster Hewitt terrestrial radio was my solution from 104 years after the first broadcast. “Hello, Canada, and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland”.
Re:
Current setup for NHL has the TV rights for the playoffs to ESPN and TBS.. usually the RSN for the local team also has rights for the first round for that local team; not sure how this deal affects this..
Re: Re: Playoffs with home announcers
A serious revenue source would be offering all playoff games called by your home team announcers.
Hell you could probably sell it to terrible team fans just for the hope factor.
“Now announcing our 10th MLB team to join the program, and a major Wall Street investment in the platform. In other news, this free service is now going to cost 49.99 a month. (Regional blackout rules will now apply. Pay no attention to the CEO pay raise of 500%.)
Great, so everyone can watch the Stars again fail to mount a credible Cup Run.
Tyler Seguin is no Connor McDavid!
I think a major reasoning behind this is that younger viewers just aren’t tuning into sports as much as they used to. If they want to stay relevant they have to be relevant to young people instead of just expecting them to show up as they have been able to in the past.
Re:
Unfortunately for sports leagues, the youngest demographics have very little invested into the NHL’s brand of bread and circuses. Sports are to the youngsters what eSports and Twitch streams are to their parents.
And the other big problems for sports leagues is that it takes comparatively very little to get invested in watching eSports or participating in them.
Still regional
So it looks like it is still regionally limited. So if you are a fan of the Dallas Stars, but are traveling or moved elsewhere in the country, too bad. They still don’t get it.
Re:
Here, I don’t think either the Stars or the company could’ve done anything further. The out-of-territory rights might belong solely to the NHL itself.
That Darn Manfred
I’ll never understand how MLB got streaming so right (good tech, fair price for 1 team) and the blackouts so wrong. Might make sense in mkts with 2 teams, but between Chicago & LA, it makes no sense at all.
Live in Tulsa? Great! You’re blocked from the Royals, Cards, Rangers & Astros (Houston is 500 miles from Tulsa)
Here’s a used bandage for that ruptured spleen. Enjoy!