There’s a lot of discussion around the attempts from Diamond Sports Group (the parent company of the Bally Sports-branded regional sports networks) to exit bankruptcy and carry on providing local game broadcasts for a lot of MLB, NBA, NHL, and other teams (albeit a much slimmer roster than they had ahead of their March 2023 bankruptcy). But an interesting point amidst all this is the fire the company has been under not from leagues or teams, but individual users.
Complaints of glitches and errors on Diamond’s Bally Sports app (which works either with an authenticated multichannel video programming distributor login or as an over-the-top Bally Sports+ service costing $20 a month) have been a thing for much of the last few years. But they really showed up in a notable way Tuesday night with complaints from users in a lot of different Diamond markets that they could not get the app to work. Here are some of those:
Everything about @BallySports is second rate. Production, customer service and the app blows.
Trying to watch my team win their division and the app completely exploded.
Only thing they’ve got going for them is their social media and content team. 👀
— Nathan Bloechl (@NathanBloechl) September 17, 2024
Hey @BallySports WE ARE NOT DOING THIS TONIGHT
— Liam Neeson 〽️ 🏆 (@Liam_Foster222) September 17, 2024
Death, taxes, and the @BallySports app being borderline unusable. #royals
— #MVPat (@rbkcmo) September 17, 2024
From Bally Sports…
“We’re currently experiencing unusually high messaging volume. Please try again later.” Um…yea…We’d like to see the @tigers game. Please and thank you.— Carole L. | Vote Blue | Colburn-Mitzner (@techlady56) September 18, 2024
@ballysportshelp Look at this trash app of yours. Pathetic. I want my money back. pic.twitter.com/ofoDgCBwbw
— Gene Moore (@GeneInKC) September 18, 2024
@BallySports is your app not working? Closed, restarted and even uninstalled/installed the app. Still not working. Can’t watch the @Brewers @ballysportshelp
— Mike Rubocki (@coasterfreak04) September 17, 2024
This sparked a significant response from the @BallySportsHelps customer service account on X/Twitter:
Bally Sports is currently experiencing a streaming interruption across multiple regions. We know every moment matters. The Bally Sports operations team is working quickly to identify and resolve the issue. We will update you when service has been restored.
— BallySportsHelp (@ballysportshelp) September 18, 2024
That post then got more than 100 replies and a lot of further quote tweets, many with further complaints. So this was definitely a notable outage impacting fans in multiple markets, and doing so during an important September Tuesday of MLB action. And while the Bally app is far from the first streaming service to hit technical difficulties, it’s notable that the frequency of complaints there seems to be dropping significantly at bigger companies and networks.
Meanwhile, there have been so many continued shots at the Diamond/Bally RSNs. And those have come for plenty of ongoing things also including login issues and stream quality, not just complete outages. And that’s led to a lot of celebration from a lot of fans when teams have left those RSNs for alternatives.
The future of these RSNs is very much up in the air. It’s not fully clear at this point if their plans to exit bankruptcy by April 1, 2025 (a timeframe agreed to by the NBA and NHL, but pushed back on by MLB) will actually come together or not. But it certainly can’t make teams and leagues still working with them happy to have to field high numbers of further complaints from viewers unable to access games due to technical issues. And that may add to the incentives for others to leave.
