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Victory+ failed. Is this the end of sports streaming for free?
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- Victory+ failed. Is this the end of sports streaming for free?
image via Dallas Stars/Victory+
In September 2024, Victory+ was founded with a simple dream: to deliver major professional sports on streaming for free.
Two years later, the Victory+ vision is dead.
The streaming service shut down as of September 1. The move comes after the Texas Rangers , Anaheim Ducks and National Women's Soccer League ended their agreements with the company in July due to missed payments.
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Now, agreements with the Dallas Stars, the Minnesota Lynx, the Atlanta Dream, Texas's University Interscholastic League (UIL) high school football championship, and the Western Hockey League have also ended.
So is the hope of major sports being free on streaming now dead?
Fan interest is certainly there. A March Fox News poll found that 72% of sports fans think major sports events should be required to air on free broadcast television.
Plus, many other services offer free sports . But what differentiated Victory+ from the many other FAST streaming services and channels was that it offered sports people actually wanted to watch.
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While other FAST networks offered lower-level Division I conferences or Japanese baseball, Victory+ streamed the NHL's Dallas Stars and Anaheim Ducks, along with the National Women's Soccer League and the aforementioned Texas high school football. Sure, those pale in comparison to the offerings on mainstream sports networks like ESPN, but those are sports with real audiences.
Both the Stars and Ducks will move to paid streaming solutions through Amazon Prime Video. The NWSL, for its part, will remain on FAST with an agreement with Roku .
Victory+'s problem was clear: the economics never quite worked. After starting with just the Stars, they quickly expanded. If more financing had come, they reportedly had tentative agreements in place with several NBA teams. But the financing never came.
Stars President and CEO Brad Alberts, speaking to the media via Stars Thoughts , blamed Victory+'s parent company, A Parent Media Co. Inc., for the failure.
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"There were major, major mistakes made at the management level that led to their demise," Alberts said. "If this would have been run differently, there's no reason why we couldn't have continued this."
In essence, it was a "catch-22" for the platform. By expanding quickly and inking multiple different agreements across different sports, they built a platform with mainstream interest. But that quick expansion also resulted in financing running out sooner than it otherwise might have.
If Victory+ had just stuck with an agreement with the Stars, would this have ended up a different story?
To be clear, free sports is not fully dead. Many NBA and NHL teams have reached agreements to put all of their games on over-the-air television. But there are even warning signs for over-the-air television. The Thunder, Blackhawks, and Kings, among others, will remain in the cable bundle, while the Timberwolves and Pacers will put their games behind a paywall with DAZN.
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Even the NBA teams that have gone fully over-the-air are doing so with one-year deals or, at least, with opt-outs after the first year. That would allow them to join the NBA's future "streaming regional sports network," which will likely only be available behind a streamer's paywall.
The economics of over-the-air are also very different from the economics of a free streamer like Victory+. While over-the-air networks can be watched without a subscription using an antenna, the vast majority of their viewership still comes via more traditional cable services like DIRECTV or YouTube TV, allowing these networks to continue charging carriage fees that made regional sports networks so lucrative.
The simple reality is that teams have not yet made it economically viable. It certainly isn't from a lack of trying. There are still some competitors. BZZR, which is set up similarly to Victory+, reached an agreement to stream Los Angeles Rams preseason games . It also acquired the rights to house the Texas Rangers' paid direct-to-consumer streaming service, which previously belonged to, you guessed it, Victory+.
But the fact that not a single new NBA or NHL team has reached an agreement with Victory+, BZZR, or any other free streamer is a pretty good indication of how teams feel about the model.
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That isn't to say that, under the right circumstances, the model couldn't still work. People did use Victory+. Brad Alberts told the media that two million people downloaded the Victory+ app, and viewership for the Stars increased compared to the previous arrangement on cable.
But while free increases viewership, it also comes with a significant revenue hit. If it is one team with strong revenue from other sources, such as a national TV deal, they may be willing to eat the loss. But revenue becomes a much bigger problem for a streaming platform trying to balance many different deals.
A one-off team may be willing to take the revenue hit for the increased exposure and good PR. But the dream of a larger platform, with lots of teams airing their games for free, seems just as aspirational as it did two years ago.
The post Victory+ failed. Is this the end of sports streaming for free? appeared first on Awful Announcing .
