FREE AT LAST! Live look at Brewer fans finding out their nightmare with Bally is over:
I think it was REALLY early this year where news broke that Diamond Sports Group (the company that owns and operates Bally) filed for bankruptcy. They didn’t say it, they declared it.
Then came reports that Amazon was in negotiations to take over Brewer and Bucks broadcasts and put them on Prime. That was right before the baseball season got underway, and obviously nothing came of it because Bally covered the Brewers all season. After that we really hadn’t heard anything about the future of Bally or what was going to happen with Brewer and Bucks broadcasts going forward.
Until yesterday. The Brewers will be taking the same path that the Diamondbacks took last year. No, not going to the World Series (sigh), but allowing MLB to take over their TV broadcasts for the 2025 season.
So what does this mean for your Brewer consumption next season? I’ll be honest, I had to sift through more than a few articles on that topic before I felt like I had a grasp on how this was going to work. I just turned 40 in June and this is how I was feeling:
It is my understanding that if you watched the Brewers on Bally with a regular ol’ cable TV subscription, very little will change next season. There will be a channel (likely called ‘Brewers TV’) that will broadcast all of the games like normal. It might not be the exact same channel number as Bally, but it will be there.
For those of us that cut that cord and used the Bally Sports app to watch games? It sounds like MLB will offer an MLB TV subscription that covers just the Brewers for a lower yearly rate. Diamondbacks fans got coverage for $20 a month last season, or $100 for the season. Pretty reasonable. Then you just download the MLB app on your Firestick or Roku or whatever and watch it that way.
There’s also the chance that MLB will negotiate rights with local TV to broadcast some, or all, of the games next season. Remember in spring when WMLW did 10 over-the-air broadcasts of Bucks games?? Something like that could happen for the Brewers as well. Bring back the days of Brewer gamers on Channel 18 or Channel 24! I doubt anybody would pay for the rights for the ENTIRE season, but a world exists where some of them are just ‘on TV.’
Anyway you slice it, this is a win for the Brewers and their fans. I don’t think Bally was as glitchy if you were just watching on cable TV, but the app experience was about as fun as a root canal. Randomly the game would stop working, sometimes you couldn’t log in, sometimes you tried to join a game in the middle of it but the app would start you at the pregame with no fast-forward option, random error codes, it was a mess. I consider this the first ‘win’ of the offseason for the franchise.
PS: It will be all of the same broadcasters as well next season. There was some speculation that a new broadcast team would be a part of the equation. Nope. BA, Rock, Sophia, Levering, they’re all back next season. Just trade out the Bally Sports polos for Brewers TV polos.
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