The NHL’s Dallas Stars ended their relationship with Victory+ this week, culminating a swift collapse of the local sports streaming company that, outwardly at least, seemed to unravel in just a span of 50 days.
The Stars weren’t just one of the first Victory+ clients; the pro hockey franchise was also one of its most important investment partners, pouring what one team official described as “double-digit millions of dollars” into the streaming venture since it was founded in February 2024.
Late Tuesday, Victory+ emailed a statement to what was perhaps its last remaining client, alerting a group of North Texas high school football administrators that it had laid of its staff and ceased operations. Victory+ wouldn’t be able to locally live-stream their prep games this fall.
Also, several A Parent Media Company (APMC)/Victory+ C-suite operatives announced their exits on LinkedIn this week, including former Chief Strategy Officer Narendra Nag and Chief Technology Officer Daniel Riddell.
“We did everything we could to save them. Everything,” said Stars CEO Brad Alberts during a Wednesday morning press conference. “We took this right to the end.”
The Stars will now live-stream regular-season games not picked up by national TV rights holders ABC/ESPN and TNT Sports on Amazon Prime Video. Stars fans won’t have to pay the usual $20-$30 a month subscription fee to watch, only their Amazon Prime subscription.
Amazon Prime Video will be the Stars’ third local TV home in a span of just over two years; the team left Sinclair Broadcast Group’s failing Bally Sports array of regional sports networks (RSNs) in July 2024. The Stars had made plans to join a new direct-to-consumer streaming venture, Victory+, being co-founded by Calgary-based entrepreneurs Mike Lowe and Neil Gruninger.
Where it all began
The Canadian duo’s APMC had previously established bonafides by producing popular Canadian kids video franchise Kidoodle.TV, enticing investors including local Calgary-based private equity shop TriWest Capital Partners and the Stars’ owner, Canadian business executive Tom Gaglardi.
The Victory+ business plan seemed simple and Canada strong: as the once-lucrative RSN business collapsed in the U.S. right along with video cord cutting, organizations from Major League Baseball, the NBA and NHL would need live-streaming production and technology infrastructure providers to present their non-nationally televised games to local audiences.
Victory+ seemed to compete effectively against rival streaming shops including powerful ViewLift (just purchased in August by London-based sports streaming giant DAZN from media entrepreneur Ted Leonsis.). And its business model had an interesting twist — fans wouldn’t have to pay a subscription fee. Team channels were free and ad-supported, with affiliated local teams’ live games streamable to fans living in the organization’s designated marketing area.
Lowe, a former winner of Canada’s prestigious Memorial Cup as a hockey player, died suddenly at 47 on Christmas Day 2023 due to a heart attack. Gruninger, with financial backing from TriWest and Stars, finished building the Victory+ network.
And the pro teams came. These included the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks, Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers, the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx and Atlanta Dream, and the National Women’s Soccer League’s Bay FC, Washington Spirit, Orlando Pride, Gotham FC and Angel City FC.
These teams — all of them refugees from failed RSN enterprises, mostly Sinclair’s since-liquidated operation — hoped that their ad-supported DTC channels would grow to replace the tens of millions of dollars a season they had been generating on pay TV regional sports networks.
Only the Rangers charged a subscription fee — it was required by MLB competition rules.
Gruninger’s group thought up some interesting ad-supported permutations unique among local-DTC-channel providers for live sports. For example, APMC set the Stars and Ducks up with separate FAST channels on Samsung TV Plus, creating secondary revenue streams for non-live-game content.
Where it went wrong
But justifying high local sports team licensing costs is difficult enough leveraging both subscription and ad-supported streams. Alberts said the Stars only received 2% of what APMC owed them from last NHL season.
Victory’s teams weren’t getting paid.
“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.”
At least outwardly and until recently, Victory+ seemed to be winning at live sports streaming, with the WNBA’s Lynx signing on in April, amid the final collapse of Sinclair’s rebranded FanDuel Sports network.
Outwardly, the stunning Victory+ implosion seemed to happen gradually and then all at once. On July 15, the Texas Rangers announced in the middle of the ongoing MLB season that they were moving their local games to BZZR, a digital broadcast channel owned by RTL Group’s Fremantle North America. BZZR is available for free, and via over-the-air and on through pay TV subscriptions, but Rangers fans have to pay $25 a month to watch games.
The Ducks announced the same day that the team was leaving Victory+ for an over-the-air broadcast deal with Fox-owned Southern California TV stations KTTV and KCOP.
By the end of July, TriWest board member Jon Spencer had moved over to replace Gruninger and save the operation. But the teams kept leaving the platform, culminating in this week’s Stars departure.
“Our intended goal … was to try to figure out a way to keep Victory+ financially solvent and in this space,” Alberts said. “But at the end of the day, the financial mismanagement and damage that had been done to APMC and Victory was too much to overcome.”