The impending death of Bally Sports

[RedRamage]

15 hours ago, Shelton said:

The current situation should not prompt a single “greedy bastards” comment beyond what could have been said six months ago. 

I suspect that others are feeling similar to me, but of course I can't say for sure.

Six months ago I thought of Bally/Diamond/Fan Duel/whatever as being incompetent greedy bastards. Between the crappy app and talk about always seeming to be one slight step away from bankruptcy, I felt like they HAD to charge a high price because they could barely operate as that high price point, let alone at a more reasonable monthly rate.

I had hoped that a more established, stable, capable company like MLB media would be able to provide the same, or better, without having to go as high in the monthly charge. And yes, I fully get that that hope was silly, but it was still there. 

I guess I viewed it a bit like this:

Fan Duel is a crappy apply pie maker. They don't know how to cut up apples well. They spill a lot of ingredients all over the place. They turn on the oven hours before they're ready to start baking and end up burning 1 out of every 10 pies they make, having to throw it away. Therefore they need to charge $20 per pie to cover costs.

MLB Media however is much more efficient. They get more usable cuts from every apple, take care of ingredients well, watch their pies when baking and only turn on the oven when needed. Their costs are lower so they should be able to charge $16 per pie and still cover costs, but their charging $20 instead.

Obviously this is all conjecture on my part and maybe I'm making a load of really wrong assumptions here.

[Shelton]

1 hour ago, RedRamage said:

I suspect that others are feeling similar to me, but of course I can't say for sure.

Six months ago I thought of Bally/Diamond/Fan Duel/whatever as being incompetent greedy bastards. Between the crappy app and talk about always seeming to be one slight step away from bankruptcy, I felt like they HAD to charge a high price because they could barely operate as that high price point, let alone at a more reasonable monthly rate.

I had hoped that a more established, stable, capable company like MLB media would be able to provide the same, or better, without having to go as high in the monthly charge. And yes, I fully get that that hope was silly, but it was still there. 

I guess I viewed it a bit like this:

Fan Duel is a crappy apply pie maker. They don't know how to cut up apples well. They spill a lot of ingredients all over the place. They turn on the oven hours before they're ready to start baking and end up burning 1 out of every 10 pies they make, having to throw it away. Therefore they need to charge $20 per pie to cover costs.

MLB Media however is much more efficient. They get more usable cuts from every apple, take care of ingredients well, watch their pies when baking and only turn on the oven when needed. Their costs are lower so they should be able to charge $16 per pie and still cover costs, but their charging $20 instead.

Obviously this is all conjecture on my part and maybe I'm making a load of really wrong assumptions here.

This is an interesting perspective, and to be clear I understand the point you are making. However, I think it’s missing the way prices are set. It’s similar to how folks will say that ticket prices will rise if the team signs an expensive free agent. That’s not how the economy works. Tickets, beer, streaming services, etc are priced at a level that will maximize revenue, and I think you know that. So I don’t really get why anyone would expect the tigers/mlb/anyone to provide a product at an economically inefficient price. 
 

Folks are going to charge the price that maximizes their profit. They have to compete with other entertainment choices in setting that price, as well as general consumer demand for the product in particular, so it’s not unlimited. If Netflix and other similar services cost 50 dollars a month and enough people would pay that, then Netflix would cost 50 dollars per month. The same goes for baseball, and it has little to do with what the cost of production is. 
 

That said, we can go back to your apple pie analogy. Bally and its successors charged 20 dollars a month for its direct to consumer subscription, and because they were spilling apples everywhere that wasn’t enough to keep the business from failing. They were able to sell the pies for less than that when they had thousands of people buying the pies that didn’t know they were buying the pies and didn’t even like pies, and those extra pies cost the producer nothing to make. Once they could start selling pies directly they screwed it up, thinking they could charge more and still get the people that hate pie to keep buying it as part of their grocery bundle. 
 

Anyway, I would pay more than 20 bucks a month to watch the tigers so this is great for me. You can always vote with your wallet and just listen on the radio if it isn’t worth it, but I’m guessing you won’t. So that should tell you everything you need to know about whether the price is correct. 
 

The next time a seller sets their price at a level to simply cover cost will be the first.

[chasfh]

DirecTV Extra Innings charges me the same either way: $149.99 for both satellite channels and MLB.tv, which incudes MLB audio (although I get that through my SiriusXM subscription anyway, which I prefer because of the commercials situation). I get the convenience of just putting on the TV and pressing three digits and select to get my channel, but if I do want the option of going to MLB.tv on my Apple TV box and navigating through several menus and choices to get a game, I can do that, too.

I have 99 problems, but FanDuel was never one. 

[RedRamage]

22 hours ago, Shelton said:

Tickets, beer, streaming services, etc are priced at a level that will maximize revenue, and I think you know that. 

I like to pretend this isn't the case though. 🙂 Seriously though, I do get that... I fully understand that pricing isn't done just to cover costs. If 90 out of a 100 people will buy my product that $10, I gross $900. If I drop the price to $9 so I can get 7 more of those 100 customers I end up only grossing $873. The math doesn't make sense.

However...

Quote

You can always vote with your wallet and just listen on the radio if it isn’t worth it, but I’m guessing you won’t.

There are other options besides this. There are, shall we say, more complex but cheaper methods of getting the content. How willing people are to pursue those other methods is dependent, in part, on the price being charged. Now, I'm sure this isn't any big news to MLB or the Tigers. I'm sure this knowledge is factored into the calculation.

I just hoped that perhaps with a (hopefully) more efficient, competent production with (hopefully) lower costs that the calculation would show a lower price would be as profitable. For example, if I lowered by price in my silly example above to $9.5 and this got me 95 customers, then I'm grossing $902.50. If I can lower the cost of producing my product enough that I can lower the retails I could make more money in the end.

As I said, this isn't anything ground breaking and I'm sure far smarter people than I have looked at all the numbers and done the calculations and decided on the best price point for profit... I was just hoping Bally/Fan Duel, when they did the calculation, had to factor in higher production costs so the new calculation without them would return a lower number.

[oblong]

For me apps are fine in limited circumstances but in general I don't like it when the games I want to watch are on them.  I like to flip around.  Unless it's a "must see" game like a playoff or an opener where it will have my full attention...  Otherwise having to exit out and then go back is annoying.  Then they forget who you are and you have to log in again.  I'm a dinosaur.  I still have cable.   I will be ticked if I have to pay for this more than I am now.  I'm already on an elevated tier that includes sports, like MLB Network, Big Ten,  NHL Network, etc. and that includes FanDuel.  Before their fight a a few years ago the old Bally's wasn't on that tier, they moved it to that.  Fine, whatever.   But if I now have to go above that, yeah it will bother me.  I'll pay it because I'm a slappy... but it stinks.

If it were just me in the house, I'd go bare bones and get rid of all of it, like my son has done since he moved out.  But my wife needs Friends on during the day on TBS and at night on Nick.  Yeah, I know it's on HBO Max.  That's not the same. 

 

 

[Shelton]

On 3/5/2026 at 11:15 AM, chasfh said:

DirecTV Extra Innings charges me the same either way: $149.99 for both satellite channels and MLB.tv, which incudes MLB audio (although I get that through my SiriusXM subscription anyway, which I prefer because of the commercials situation). I get the convenience of just putting on the TV and pressing three digits and select to get my channel, but if I do want the option of going to MLB.tv on my Apple TV box and navigating through several menus and choices to get a game, I can do that, too.

I have 99 problems, but FanDuel was never one. 

You live out of market. Fanduel was never even an option to be that 100th problem. 

[Sports_Freak]

On 3/5/2026 at 11:13 AM, Shelton said:

This is an interesting perspective, and to be clear I understand the point you are making. However, I think it’s missing the way prices are set. It’s similar to how folks will say that ticket prices will rise if the team signs an expensive free agent. That’s not how the economy works. Tickets, beer, streaming services, etc are priced at a level that will maximize revenue, and I think you know that. So I don’t really get why anyone would expect the tigers/mlb/anyone to provide a product at an economically inefficient price. 
 

Folks are going to charge the price that maximizes their profit. They have to compete with other entertainment choices in setting that price, as well as general consumer demand for the product in particular, so it’s not unlimited. If Netflix and other similar services cost 50 dollars a month and enough people would pay that, then Netflix would cost 50 dollars per month. The same goes for baseball, and it has little to do with what the cost of production is. 
 

That said, we can go back to your apple pie analogy. Bally and its successors charged 20 dollars a month for its direct to consumer subscription, and because they were spilling apples everywhere that wasn’t enough to keep the business from failing. They were able to sell the pies for less than that when they had thousands of people buying the pies that didn’t know they were buying the pies and didn’t even like pies, and those extra pies cost the producer nothing to make. Once they could start selling pies directly they screwed it up, thinking they could charge more and still get the people that hate pie to keep buying it as part of their grocery bundle. 
 

Anyway, I would pay more than 20 bucks a month to watch the tigers so this is great for me. You can always vote with your wallet and just listen on the radio if it isn’t worth it, but I’m guessing you won’t. So that should tell you everything you need to know about whether the price is correct. 
 

The next time a seller sets their price at a level to simply cover cost will be the first.

I look at it as cost per game. Its less than $1 per game.