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The Bally Sports Thread


Georgie56

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Well, to bring this thread up to speed, Bally has since breached one of their loan covenants and missed a payment to the Arizona Diamondbacks.

They have a grace period of until March 17th to pay the Diamondbacks.  Bankruptcy could be coming by then, finally.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/12/mlb-to-stream-games-for-free-amid-looming-diamond-sports-bankruptcy-sources/

 

A side effect of what could be coming?  MLB could be offering free streaming to customers of the affected teams.

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11 hours ago, GodfreyGR said:

It's Official. Bally's Is Bankrupt.

To be clear, Bally's Corporation is not bankrupt. Diamond Sports is bankrupt. They were just a licensee of the Bally brand name.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Bally wanted to revoke that license at some point.

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What happened to the local sports business?  Why would Sinclair buy the networks from Disney if they were going to be bankrupt?  On the national level,  MLB, NHL,  and the NBA are making so much money from their TV deals.  Why on the local level the networks are not?

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39 minutes ago, JTT said:

What happened to the local sports business?  Why would Sinclair buy the networks from Disney if they were going to be bankrupt?  On the national level,  MLB, NHL,  and the NBA are making so much money from their TV deals.  Why on the local level the networks are not?

Because the cord-cutting and reliance on a dwindling pool of willing subscribers to pay a "regional sports fee" on top of an already inflated bill is the final straw. 

National networks can pass this off with their broad reach, and their hands in the viewer's pocketbooks are much less apparent than the RSN's have ever been.

 

Bottom line, sports has gotten too expensive.  Viewers are tired of paying for it through high pay TV bills.  Providers don't want to drive up the cost of their service too much by agreeing what the RSN's want to charge (which is the high price the leagues pass on to the RSNs).  And seeing what it really costs, no one wants to pay $25 a month to watch their team on an RSN app.  

 

Covid and cord-cutting exacerbated this trend.  Sinclair took the bait and paid dearly for it, especially when they lost most of the providers that carried it. 

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41 minutes ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Because the cord-cutting and reliance on a dwindling pool of willing subscribers to pay a "regional sports fee" on top of an already inflated bill is the final straw. 

National networks can pass this off with their broad reach, and their hands in the viewer's pocketbooks are much less apparent than the RSN's have ever been.

 

Bottom line, sports has gotten too expensive.  Viewers are tired of paying for it through high pay TV bills.  Providers don't want to drive up the cost of their service too much by agreeing what the RSN's want to charge (which is the high price the leagues pass on to the RSNs).  And seeing what it really costs, no one wants to pay $25 a month to watch their team on an RSN app.  

 

Covid and cord-cutting exacerbated this trend.  Sinclair took the bait and paid dearly for it, especially when they lost most of the providers that carried it. 

I’m sure most of the providers they lost were the vMVPDs, to where DirecTV Stream was the only one that carried each of the 19 Bally Sports networks until FuboTV re-added them in January.

 

The irony is, it wasn’t always this way. Many of the RSNs that exist today once were distributed as premium channels that customers had to add onto their cable package (a la HBO and Showtime). The question is how much cost savings would customers have now, if RSNs didn’t transition to basic cable packages, and would RSNs still being made available a la carte offset the cost of carrying other channels that command higher subscriber fees (ESPN, TNT, Disney Channel, etc.)?

 

The 1992 Cable Act’s retrans provisions only created more stress on RSNs in the past decade or so, by helping to drive pay TV prices to be able to carry other channels to progressively higher rates that led to the dramatic increase in cord-cutting… and that’s on top of service and equipment fees that add to the cost of subscribing to conventional pay TV providers. (National sports networks also contribute to the high cost, because of both retrans compensation and sports rights fees, if ESPN’s $5+/subscriber fee is any indication.)

Edited by T.L. Hughes
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  • 3 weeks later...

Now, MLB is trying to force Bally to pay up for the Cleveland Guardians (Indians) and the Minnesota Twins.  They skipped these payments, and if if they don'r pay up, they could seize the rights from Bally.

https://theathletic.com/4385805/2023/04/05/mlb-diamond-sports-bankruptcy-twins-guardians/

 

Since they-re post bankruptcy filing, does this have any chance of actually happening?

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And now, it's come to this.   Diamond has been ordered to cough up the rest of the money it owes to the affected baseball teams, or they must forfeit the rights to carry them.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/37776665/diamond-sports-group-ordered-fully-pay-twins-guardians-diamondbacks-rangers%3fplatform=amp

 

So basically Diamond Sports is getting no relief whatsoever from the bankruptcy they filed? Ouch!

Edited by tyrannical bastard
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5 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

And now, it's come to this.   Diamond has been ordered to cough up the rest of the money it owes to the affected baseball teams, or they must forfeit the rights to carry them.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/37776665/diamond-sports-group-ordered-fully-pay-twins-guardians-diamondbacks-rangers%3fplatform=amp

 

So basically Diamond Sports is getting no relief whatsoever from the bankruptcy they filed? Ouch!

Only the Twins, Guardians, Diamondbacks, and Rangers are part of the ruling in the article.

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16 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

And now, it's come to this.   Diamond has been ordered to cough up the rest of the money it owes to the affected baseball teams, or they must forfeit the rights to carry them.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/37776665/diamond-sports-group-ordered-fully-pay-twins-guardians-diamondbacks-rangers%3fplatform=amp

 

So basically Diamond Sports is getting no relief whatsoever from the bankruptcy they filed? Ouch!

And Judge Lopez has ordered Diamond to pay the affected teams in full within 5 days

 

So buckle your seatbelts folks, things is about to get very interesting in a hurry.

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Quote

Reporting from The Athletic indicates that as part of the proceedings, MLB outside counsel forced DSG representatives to reveal that Diamond’s nascent streaming platform Bally Sports+ — which provides in-market streaming of games without the need for a pay-TV subscription for five MLB, 16 NBA, and 12 NHL teams — has just 203,000 subscribers. That number represents 55% of the company’s subscriber targets after its soft-launch in June 2022 and full launch in September.

 

Despite these figures, Diamond CEO David Preschlack still believes that the service will quadruple its subscriber total between now and the end of this year to more than 800,000. He testified this week that he projects Bally Sports+ will have 10 million users by 2028.

 

https://thestreamable.com/news/bankruptcy-reveals-bally-sports-plus-only-has-203k-subscribers-is-streamer-closer-to-closing-than-hitting-10m-goal

 

Yikes.

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I get the feeling that the VPN routing traffic within team territories for MLB.tv is much more than the number of BS+ subscribers. I'm sure the numbers for Tennis Channel Plus are also miserably low and starving that sport for exposure they've been losing for over a decade.

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