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

As teams try to figure out the new regional sports network world, Dallas is going bold.

If you live in the Dallas Stars TV market it’ll be free to watch the team for the next seven seasons.

The Stars are also leaving terrestrial television.

It’s one of the most fascinating turns we’ve seen as NHL teams have left the regional sports network (RSNs) model behind.

On Monday morning the Stars announced the creation of Victory+, a new direct-to-consumer platform that will stream live games in-market starting during the 2024-25 season.

For a clarification point, the Stars TV market consists of all of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

While other teams have left RSNs in the past two seasons, the Stars are the first going all-in on the streaming and free element.

The Florida Panthers, for example left the Bally-branded networks last week and worked out an over-the-air TV deal with Scripps, which will be in conjunction with an in-market streaming platform that is yet to be unveiled. The Vegas Golden Knights and then-Arizona Coyotes (not Utah Hockey Club) did something similar with Scripps during the 2023-24 season, with in-market streaming platforms costing a subscription fee to users.

It’s a bold move by Dallas, and one that the rest of the league is going to closely watch, because the Stars are going against all traditional thinking here.

RSN contracts typically accounted for $35 million per season for NHL teams, some higher and some lower. So the Stars are betting on making up that type of revenue on a completely free service, with zero cost to the consumer.

The Stars have signed a seven-year deal with A Parent Media Co. Inc. (APMC) to make the deal work. APMC is the media company behind Dude Perfect’s direct-to-consumer channel, and the success and growth of that brand, which happens to be located near the Stars headquarters, helped Stars president Brad Alberts feel confident a free product could make financial sense.

(Side note, Dude Perfect has now been a figure in helping the Stars land Joe Pavelski as a free agent and getting them a new viewership solution.)

The Stars will have to sell their own advertisement and work directly with sponsors, but they also expect overall viewership to go up. Between chord cutting and carriage disputes between Bally-branded networks, it became very hard to find Stars games on television in DFW the past two years.

Alberts has called this “the most difficult business problem he’s faced” in his career, and the Stars have been working on an eventual divorce with Bally Sports-branded networks for 18 months now.

As noted earlier, there is no TV element to this deal. That is going to be one of the early challenges the Stars will face with this new direct-to-consumer product.

To watch a game you have to have the app on your device or smart TV, while the Stars might try to find a minor deal for a handful of over-the-air games, you will not be able to flip through channels to find a Stars game like you could with Bally Sports Southwest — if you had a TV provider that carried the network.

It also makes it more difficult to find Stars games in sports bars and restaurants. Putting the game on TV in the restaurant is no longed as simple as asking for bartender to turn a channel, those establishments themselves will now have to download Victory+ and commit a screen to it.

Alberts said finding ways to get Victory+ into restaurants and bars is going to be part of the role out for the product, but admits that this is one of the things he wrestled with when figuring out a solution with APMC.

On the flip side, the Stars now own all of their own rights, for everything.

Under the old format the Stars couldn’t live stream a scrimmage or even a practice without permission from the Bally-branded network. Anything done live, had to go through the rights holder. The Stars are now their own rights holder, they can do what they want for any non-national TV broadcast.

And Alberts said the Stars will have to make sure they take full advantage of that, and work on creating as much content as possible. His hope is that Victory+ is also a service that connect with out-of-market Stars fans, who won’t be able to stream games — those will still be on ESPN+ — but will have access to additional team content that couldn’t have been created before.

Again, other teams are watching this closely. Alberts told me other NHL teams have engaged in conversations with APMC as well and have reached out to Dallas to learn more about how they are going all-in on streaming and free product.