As the RSN model continues to change, what are the early returns on Victory+?

Another look at one of the most fascinating off-ice topics in the NHL this season.

It’s been another big week of developments for the struggling and now re-shaping of the landscape for NHL teams and Regional Sports Networks (RSNs).

On Wednesday it was announced that the Diamond-owned RSNs, which are now known as FanDuel Sports Network, will be available through Amazon Prime and games will be available a la carte for $6.99 per game.

It’s a high single-game price, especially when you consider a monthly subscription for a direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform that includes all of those games is priced at $19.99 per month. With that $19.99 price point individual games, if you only care about the NHL element in one of those markets, come to roughly $2 per contest.

On one hand, it’s nice to have the a la carte option available — there are some hypothetical customers I can recognize — but it’s also not going to save the RSN model nor is the price point inviting. For some anecdotal evidence, I was listening to sports talk radio here in Detroit on Wednesday and there were several calls/discussions about the corporate greed involved with this price point.

While this is something that impacts fans of eight NHL teams (Carolina, Columbus, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Nashville, St. Louis, and Tampa), games are free this season in-market for fans of the Anaheim Ducks and Dallas Stars through Victory+.

I’ve written plenty about this before, from both a Ducks and Stars perspective, which you can see here.

The Dallas Stars have left TV and are going all-in on free in-market streaming

The Anaheim Ducks are trying to "meet fans where they're at" with move to Victory+

Wanting to follow up on the situation, I chatted with Stars team president Brad Alberts on Wednesday night about how things have been going for Dallas with the new platform.

For starters, it’s important to note that it’s way too early for this to be seen as a failure or success.

This is roughly a $40 million question for NHL teams, that’s the rough value RSNs used to bring per team, and re-creating that amount of revenue isn’t easy, especially with a free DTC platform. In fact, in order to account for this the Stars got some financial assurances from A Parent Media Company (APMC) before going with the full free approach.

With all of that in mind, Alberts said the Victory+ success/failure discussion can’t happen for at least two seasons. After year two of Victory+, then the Stars can really start to diagnose what works and doesn’t.

But in the short term Alberts has been happy with how things have played out.

The Stars received some initial complaints about the switch, but those have died down. The Stars have also been able to keep advertisers engaged, sales have been very good according to Alberts.

The project has also gained some goodwill with the Stars diehard fan based, which has been able to easily watch their team for the first time in years.

The biggest challenge, and this is why the Stars have that internal two-year success window to account for, is viewership numbers. Alberts didn’t share the raw numbers with me, but admitted one of the early challenges is getting more people to watch games and normalize the platform. This has been impacted by the recent schedule, the Stars have played back-to-back Saturday games in the middle of the college football slate, which creates an uphill challenge — that Saturday game against Winnipeg Jets, which was moved earlier in the day to account for a Canadian Football League playoff game in Winnipeg, was a dud viewership wise.

So patience remains a virtue for Alberts and the Stars, who have always had stronger viewership in the second half of the season after football season ends in Texas — that’s the reality of the market.

All NHL teams need to juice money out of their fans, that’s another reality. For the Stars, and the Ducks, right now the plan with Victory+ is hoping that raw viewership increases enough over the next two seasons to make sure financially this works out well for both the teams and APMC through advertisement and sponsorship dollars.

From a fan perspective that’s something you should be rooting for. Other teams are heavily watching what’s happening with teams like the Anaheim and Dallas that went with the free DTC approach, and if the money can work for the bottom line, other teams might also be more inclined to go down similar paths in the future.

Again, this remains one of the most fascinating off-ice storylines of the season and we’ll continue to keep an eye on it at here at Shap Shots.