NHL’s Dallas Stars To Go Fully Free Streaming For Every Single Non-National Game Next Season
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.