There won’t be a next team, next league, or next departure to track anymore, because Victory+ itself is gone.
Victory+ has been dissolved by its parent company and will no longer stream Dallas Stars games or Texas high school football, as the Dallas Morning News‘ Ishmael Johnson first reported, citing an email sent to multiple North Texas school districts.
DLLS Sports and Sports Business Journal reported earlier this week that the Dallas Stars were considering a jump from Victory+ to Prime Video for next season. The Stars co-founded Victory+ and hold an equity stake in it, so their departure was always going to mean more than a typical rights loss. Dallas beat writer Sam Nestler wrote at the time that “signs point toward the end of Victory+ as a whole, not just for the Stars.”
Less than 24 hours later, that’s exactly what happened.
The collapse didn’t happen overnight. The Texas Rangers dropped Victory+ in July for a new streamer called BZZR, saying they no longer trusted the platform to meet its financial commitments. The Anaheim Ducks walked away the same day, despite having two years left on their own agreement. Two weeks after that, the NWSL pulled its matches after Victory+ missed a rights payment to the league, shifting everything to NWSL+. Victory+’s board pushed out CEO Neil Gruninger not long after that string of exits, installing TriWest Capital Partners board member Jon Spencer in his place. At that point, the company’s remaining partners — the Stars, the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx and Atlanta Dream, League One Volleyball, and Texas prep football — were said to be safe for the time being.
They weren’t, at least as the Stars are concerned — it appears that the experiment of a free streaming model for local sports, supported solely by advertising revenue, will be short-lived.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.