Victory+ Adds Texas Rangers to Dallas Stars Streaming Platform—for a Paid Annual Subscription
The Texas Rangers have finally found a home (or one of them) for their games to be watched next season. Per Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News, Rangers games will be available on Victory+ in 2025 for a $100 annual subscription.
This comes after years of many fans being unable to get FOX Sports Southwest (which then became Bally Sports Southwest) on their available television packages. I’ve seen some estimates that as many as 80% of the fans in the Rangers’ television market did not have access to their games last year through a standard cable or satellite package.
Now, the knee-jerk reaction for Stars fans might be concern about the Stars moving to a paid subscription of their own. But I think the Dallas Stars have been clear, starting with President and CEO Brad Alberts, that simply giving fans access to the games was the highest priority for them right now, especially after their own struggles with broadcasting partners over the last few years. And Alberts even mentioned in that D Magazine piece that the Stars’ plan has been to take two full years to really assess the Victory+ platform. Removing the free tier would be a pretty big shift from those stated plans.
So, all that to say: I think it’s very likely that Stars fans will continue to be able to view most regular season Stars games (excluding nationally broadcasted ones) for free for the remainder of this year, and next. Alberts has used the phrase “credit card fatigue” many times when talking about the free, ad-supported model the Stars have employed on Victory+, and I don’t think they were just waiting for a pretense to suddenly pivot to a paid model and remove the free option. But that’s just my hunch for now; I’ll have more to say on that front as things become clearer.
In fact, I do think there’s an appetite among some Stars fans for a paid subscription tier in order to avoid the forced ad breaks on game broadcasts, which can be frustrating for fans watching on delay, as you can’t use the ad breaks to “catch up” if you start a few minutes behind. And of course, folks watching the next day want to skip through ads entirely rather than spending 20+ minutes waiting for the little circle to finish its journey. The question is, would adding such an option end up helping the Stars through additional revenue or hampering their exposure, growth, and partnerships with sponsors right now?
There’s no perfect balance, of course; the Stars have to generate revenue, but the more skippable the ads, the less valuable they are to advertisers. So my guess is the Stars are looking at everything, including what a paid subscription tier would look like, and exactly what numbers they think they can hit both in terms of viewership and potential subscription revenue to make everything work. The price of being on the crest of the wave is not quite knowing where it’s going to break, but you do have to run your multimillion dollar sports franchise at something like a profit.
The early returns for Victory+ have been promising, as far as we know. And the fact that the Rangers—who play 162 regular season games—have decided to partner with the platform tells you that their own research sees wisdom in what the Dallas Stars and APMC have built. Surely the Rangers know as much as it’s possible to know about the promise of the platform; for them to move forward with it suggests a lot of confidence in the future growth of Victory+.
It also might suggest (and this is pure speculation) that people with Samsung TVs could have some renewed hope of actually getting a Victory+ app, with this new momentum from the Rangers. As Samsung TV owners know, that still hasn’t happened now, 43 games into the Stars’ season.
To me, $100 seems a pretty good bargain to watch 162 baseball games (with some possible exceptions here and there for national broadcasts), particularly if you can skip through commercial breaks when watching on a delay. But those details obviously have yet to be released. Last year, Bally Sports Southwest had a (pretty rubbish) app that you could use to stream games at $20 per month, or $189.99 per year. The argument about cable packages vs. à la carte sports subscriptions has always been that you end up paying either way. Yes, $100 is less than $190, but also, you’re only getting one team, rather than the multiple teams that Bally Sports used to have on offer.
Because the baseball and hockey seasons don’t have much overlap, I wouldn’t expect a combo-pack for both teams to be offered any time soon. And with the Mavericks already launching MavsTV at $15/month or $80/season, the Stars will likely be shrewd about how they moveto a paid service of any sort in the immediate future.
The Stars’ bet was that leaving that platform and building their own would end up being a stronger position, even if it meant less casual viewership from people who only watched Stars games “because they were on.” The irony now, of course, is that a whole slew of fans are now going to be getting Victory+ for baseball games, only to find out that they can also watch Stars games, “because they are on” the same platform. And of course, the Stars continue to add other content to Victory+, the most exciting of which in my opinion has been the Classic Games archive (though I’m wondering if they have to pay for every day they host those, as they’ve already taken down some of the initial games they had up there, like Modano’s final game in Dallas).
That’s only so much speculation, though. A lot of the details are somewhat nebulous right now. For Stars fans, I think one really pertinent question is this: what would you pay for an annual subscription tier, if it meant not having to watch ads? And remember, games would only be available on the platform for about three days after initial broadast, as older Stars games get moved to ESPN+ per the NHL’s agreement with their rights holders.
(Note: the below poll is just for folks in the Stars’ local viewing market who can already watch on Victory+. Obviously out-of-market viewers still have to subscribe to ESPN+, as always.)