If Bally Sports Channels Shut Down in 2024, What Happens Next? (2024)

Twenty years ago, regional sports networks (RSNs) sold team owners on the concept of easy money. Once they had a team’s local broadcast rights secured, they essentially held all the cards in negotiations with cable providers. Just think, if you were a cable executive and a channel with the rights to air 50+ Boston Celtics games, or 100+ Los Angeles Dodgers games per year came to you, you’d give them a blank check and be grateful they didn’t ask for more, no matter what number they landed on.

But that was at cable’s peak when pay TV had a presence in more than 100 million households in the United States. The money kept rolling in, and RSNs became a hot property. Bally Sports channels, which were originally Fox Sports Networks until 2021, were sold to Disney in 2019 in the deal that sent most of Fox’s entertainment assets to the Mouse House. Disney immediately sold off those channels for $10.6 billion to avoid monopoly accusations because of the company’s ownership of ESPN. However, the wheels came off shortly after the channels were acquired by Sinclair Broadcasting Group (SBG) subsidiary Diamond Sports Group (DSG).

Just four years later, Diamond Sports Group is approaching its 11th month in bankruptcy court. Its parent company says it plans to shut down operations after 2024, and while Diamond has not confirmed that, its deal with the NBA and proposed deal with the NHL line up to expire after the 2023-24 seasons end, and it has proposed a similar contract to MLB.

• All signs currently point to a shutdown of Bally Sports RSNs by the end of 2024.
• If the channels do go off-air, teams now covered by Bally Sports channels could end up on local broadcast channels, stay with cable or move to streaming.
• More in-market streaming options for major league sports teams are virtually guaranteed, but will differ from league to league.

Where Are Bally Sports Channels Available?

Diamond owns and operates 19 Bally Sports channels in markets from coast to coast. The 20th channel in the family, Bally Sports Arizona shut down operations in October, after losing the rights to broadcast Arizona Diamondbacks, Arizona Coyotes, and Phoenix Suns games in 2023.

Check out which Bally Sports channels are still broadcasting, and which providers carry them below.

Which Teams Have Already Left Bally Sports Channels?

As it stands, Bally Sports channels have dropped three MLB teams, one NBA team, one WNBA team, and one NHL team. The San Diego Padres were the first team to depart Bally Sports in late May, and the Arizona Diamondbacks followed at the end of June. Both of those teams saw MLB take over production of their TV broadcasts, and the league made deals directly with cable providers in their markets to televise their contests. The Minnesota Twins saw their existing contract with Bally Sports expire at the end of the 2023 regular season, and while they could renew with Bally Sports North for one more year, there has been no final call made on who will broadcast the team’s games in 2024.

The Phoenix Suns and Phoenix Mercury officially departed Bally Sports Arizona in July, and saw their games head to over-the-air broadcast channels in the Arizona market. The Arizona Coyotes also went to over-the-air channels after leaving Bally Sports Arizona in October, which caused that channel to cease operations.

What Will Happen if Bally Sports Shuts Down in 2024?

Recent experience offers some good insight into this question. If Diamond Sports Group closes its doors next year, it has arranged its affairs with the NBA and NHL. Those leagues will reclaim all of their broadcast rights, and try to sell them to new buyers.

The real question becomes, “Who will those buyers be?” The usual suspects — i.e., the huge legacy media companies like Disney, Comcast, etc. — are all on the table. However, the demise of regional sports networks has led to a fascinating new trend in the industry: teams deciding to leave cable behind in favor of local broadcast channels.

There are several reasons that local channels appeal to sports teams who are about to depart RSNs. It keeps the linear ad revenue streams open, and — though the economics are different on broadcast versus cable — those ads still pay more than streaming platforms. They also reach a much wider audience, as the New Orleans Pelicans’ recent deal with Fox 8 in Louisiana will demonstrate. That deal will allow Fox 8 to show just 10 Pelicans games per season starting in 2023, but the channel reaches 7 million Louisiana homes, whereas Bally Sports South is only in 700,000.

There’s also the fact that cable channels are losing viewers — fast. A report from March found that all of the top cable sports channels, including ESPN and FS1, were losing viewers thanks to the wider industry trend of cord cutting. With fewer subscribers paying into the cable funnel, channel owners have to charge more to generate the same amount of revenue. Sports rights have only gotten more expensive, so companies like Diamond are caught in a pattern of diminishing returns and rising prices so there’s no way to climb out of it.

Despite the decline of cable subscribers around the world, the higher subscription and ad revenues that cable brings in means it may keep attracting sports teams and leagues. Cable revenues are still around $195 billion annually, and there’s a decent chance that some of the 11 MLB teams, 15 NBA teams, and 11 NHL teams end up partnering with a cable provider to broadcast games if Bally Sports shuts down in 2024.

Being able to make deals directly with cable and satellite providers like DIRECTV helped MLB transition teams moving away from Bally Sports RSNs to new channels during the season, but fans also clamored for an in-market streaming option like Bally Sports+, which offered the chance to stream games much less expensively than a cable subscription.

Will There Be More Streaming Options for Teams if Bally Sports Shuts Down?

It’s almost guaranteed that the end of Bally Sports channels will mean more streaming options for in-market fans. Every team that departed a Bally Sports RSN in the past year (with the exception of the Twins) has created or announced an in-market streaming platform that allows fans to watch without a cable subscription. The same is true of teams that have departed AT&T SportsNet RSNs, like the Utah Jazz and Vegas Golden Knights. Even independent RSNs like Monumental Sports Network are creating their own in-market streamers as cable’s losses leave team executives seeking ways to reach audiences.

It doesn’t hurt that streaming audiences tend to be younger on average than cable and broadcast viewers, especially since Statista reports that a larger proportion of younger TV audiences consider themselves avid or casual fans. Seventy-seven percent of viewers 18-34 fall into these two categories, and that number jumps to 83% for audiences 35-44. Sports teams know full well that maintaining a young, affluent audience is crucial to their survival, and finding that audience where it is is absolutely critical in an evolving media landscape. That’s why Bally Sports attempted to launch its Bally Sports+ streaming service, but its inability to secure MLB streaming rights tarnished the service from the start.

What audiences shouldn’t expect is a fully-fledged, league-run streaming service that offers in-market games in all areas. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred wants to do exactly that with his league, but there’s no way to get owners of more profitable teams that already have in-market streaming options like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox to sign onto a platform that would see them essentially have to subsidize less profitable teams. Likewise, some NBA and NHL teams will see more profit in creating their own streaming services than in lending their rights to a league-wide streaming platform.

Will the biggest names in sports streaming among subscription video services make a play for local sports rights? It’s possible, as Max, Peaco*ck and Prime Video all have a large selection of live sports rights available, and Apple acquired the streaming rights to every MLS of the next decade in 2022. Max will now show all live sporting events on TBS and TNT, including MLB, NBA and NHL games; both Apple TV+ and Peaco*ck had a small package of MLB games to stream in 2023, as well. But streamers like these would likely have to get access to leaguewide local rights to whichever league they’d like to partner with in order to make it worth their while; otherwise, fans shouldn’t expect such streamers to try to partner up individually with any but the biggest of teams, because the size of the prospective audience for games won’t be large enough.

It will be especially key that any teams who do go to a streaming service do their best to recreate the RSN experience as closely as possible. A survey performed by Civic Science, as reported by Sports Business Journal in July, showed that 22% of fans preferred to watch MLB games on regional sports networks, whereas only 6% preferred to watch on Apple TV+ most, and only 4% picked Peaco*ck as their top baseball streaming platform.

Sports broadcast rights are growing more and more fragmented, leading to more choice but also more frustration for fans who have to seek out their favorite teams on a new source. Fans of teams covered by Bally Sports channels will likely experience similar frustration in the next year or so; if Diamond Sports Group shuts down in 2024, there’s a good possibility games will scatter across cable, broadcast channels, and myriad new streaming platforms.