tyrannical bastard 2934 Posted March 13 Share Posted March 13 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GodfreyGR 365 Posted March 15 Share Posted March 15 It's Official. Bally's Is Bankrupt. https://cordcuttersnews.com/bally-sports-just-declared-bankruptcy-the-death-of-rsns/ https://awfulannouncing.com/sinclair/diamond-sports-group-bally-sports-bankruptcy-chapter-11.html 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LoadStar 362 Posted March 15 Share Posted March 15 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GodfreyGR 365 Posted March 15 Share Posted March 15 7 hours ago, LoadStar said: To be clear, Bally's Corporation is not bankrupt. Diamond Sports is bankrupt. They were just a licensee of the Bally brand name. With respect, based off of the recent posts of the RSN, that was implied. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrschimpf 1527 Posted March 15 Share Posted March 15 The Texas Rangers are proceeding to walk away from Bally after the bankruptcy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nycnewsjunkie 885 Posted March 15 Share Posted March 15 Meanwhile, the Utah Jazz are looking at providing a hybrid linear/DTC offering next season. https://awfulannouncing.com/nba/utah-jazz-looking-at-hybrid-linear-direct-to-consumer-broadcast-model-for-2023-24-season-and-beyond.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JTT 21 Posted March 16 Share Posted March 16 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyrannical bastard 2934 Posted March 16 Share Posted March 16 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. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T.L. Hughes 546 Posted March 16 Share Posted March 16 (edited) 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 March 16 by T.L. Hughes 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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