Bally Sports (coverage including the Brewers and Bucks) expected to file for bankruptcy.

Live look at Bally Sports in a few months:

Man, who could have seen this coming? Bally seemed to be such a savvy company. After slowly pulling their channels from almost every streaming service on the planet, they decided to develop an app that only works 25% of the time and requires you to reset your Fire Stick or Roku if you stop a stream and want to rejoin it later. It seemed like the perfect business model!

Honestly, good riddance. To say Bally Sport has been hot garbage since it took over for Fox Sports is an insult to hot garbage everywhere. Actually a good representation of their effort so far would be to put a garbage bag from a Old Country Buffet in a microwave and crank that bad boy on high until the garbage exploded.

It’s inconceivable that in the year of our Lord 2023, a regional sports company could be SO BAD at making their product available and user friendly. As soon as they bought out Fox Sports in 2020, they pulled their channels from Sling. Then Hulu, then Fubo, then Youtube TV. They are STILL only available on one streaming service, the top tier package on DirecTV (almost $90 a month).

To their credit, they actually did listen to the people begging them to make a subscription service where you could purchase a season pass for Brewer or Bucks games directly from Bally and watch the games on their app. The problem is that their app almost never works. I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve clicked the ‘Bally Sports’ icon on my Fire Stick and then tried to start a game and it worked on the first try. First it will get stuck buffering, then you’ll restart your Fire Stick, then it will play an ad but not the game, then you’ll restart your Fire Stick, then it will play the ad and start you at the beginning of the broadcast with no ability to fast forward to live action. Maybe, MAYBE, by the 4th or 5th effort you’ll get it to play the current game at the current moment it’s actually in. Do you know how many times I’ve wanted to watch the end of a Bucks game but knew that with only 3 minutes left it the game there was no chance I’d get to see anything before it ended? Hundreds (dozens, don’t be so dramatic, Jon). It is INFURIATING.

So it’s no surprise that this where we landed. We can only pray that we end up with a company that is going to put Brewer and Bucks games back on mainstream streaming services. Or at least give us a subscription based app that doesn’t create a wormhole in the universe when you try to use it. Please Baby Jesus.

PS: This probably isn’t the best news for the Brewers, who likely see some chunk of money from Bally as a part of their TV contracts. In a league with no salary cap, that’s pretty important. But we just had an arbitration hearing over $750k with the best pitcher in baseball, so this might just be a drop in the bucket.