Days after Sportico reported that the Dallas Stars and Diamond Sports Group have mutually agreed to part ways, the NHL club announced that it has signed a seven-year deal with A Parent Media Co. Inc. (APMC) to stream all regional Stars games free of charge through a new direct-to-consumer FAST platform, Victory+.
The Stars are the latest team to leave the DSG/Bally Sports umbrella, yet are the first major men’s sports franchise in the U.S. to move nearly all local broadcasts out of the regional sports network model and toward a streaming service. With DSG’s future still in limbo, Texas’ hockey team decided now was the time to make the move.
“It was a process over the last couple of years with the ongoing kind of bankruptcy saga with Diamond/Bally’s,” said Brad Alberts, the Stars’ president and CEO, in a phone interview prior to leaving for the league meetings in Boston. “We rolled up our sleeves and went to work on trying to figure out an option that if (Diamond) didn’t make it, what were we going to do?”
For Stars fans in the regional territory—Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma—Victory+ will be available on smart TVs and mobile devices (including tablets) in September. For those outside of the region, the FAST (free ad-supported television) platform will show “ancillary content provided by the team.”
The games will be streamed on a low-latency feed and will have plenty of opportunities for advertising. APMC will utilize its Safe Exchange ad tech solution to serve both direct and programmatic ads, so marketers can reach fans during the game.
While evaluating its post-Diamond options, the team had been in contact with APMC, which works with another sports-adjacent group in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Dude Perfect.
Moving in this direction didn’t come without its challenges. When Alberts said back in February that the Stars may consider the all-streaming option, questions were raised about how the team could make up the potential revenue shortfall that could come from stepping away from the linear model.
Prior to the 2023-24 season, the Stars signed a deal with Nielsen, the insights company most known for its television ratings, to collect data that helped inform their decision on where to broadcast their games regardless of DSG’s reorganization plans. With those insights and the relationship with APMC, Alberts said that the Stars’ leadership grew comfortable with charting this new path.
“We looked at the technical side of this,” said Alberts. “We looked at the revenue generating side of this. We discussed whether or not we should make it free or whether we should charge. We had some pretty good debates on that and did a number of tests during the year to see how the game would come across. Can (APMC) deliver live TV? Can they insert the ad technology like we think? And you know, it passed with flying colors.”
Dallas is the fourth NHL team to part from DSG since 2023. The Vegas Golden Knights, the former Arizona Coyotes (now the Utah Hockey Club) and the Florida Panthers each signed deals with Scripps Sports. Another NHL team to move away from the RSN model is the Seattle Kraken, who are moving their lineal local broadcasts to TENGA affiliate stations in the Pacific Northwest and will stream games on Prime Video. (Kraken games previously aired on Root Sports Northwest.)
Last Wednesday, Diamond Sports Group filed a motion requesting permission to dissolve its rights deal with the Stars before the start of the 2024-25 NHL season. The Stars were carried on Bally Sports Southwest, which is 90% owned by DSG (the remaining 10% is owned by the World Series champion Texas Rangers). The Stars themselves requested that the agreement be severed before it expired in May 2025.
Dallas is also in negotiations to air a select number of games on a linear channel, though whether it will be another cable outlet or a broadcast affiliate is unclear at this time. Yet the Stars, who became the first Southern-based franchise to win the Stanley Cup in 1999, are proud to break new ground for the NHL again.
“I think we’re excited to pioneer it,” Alberts said. “We believe that this is a solution that fits the Stars really well, considering our situation here in the Southwest region, and we’re excited to kind of go for it. We believe that this is the future.”
