Gotham Sports App description Gotham Sports Promotional.
Local NetworksStreamingBy Andrew Cohen on

For New York sports fans across the tri-state area, the Gotham Sports app has acted more like Joker than Bruce Wayne since the highly touted streaming service debuted in October 2024.

MSG Networks and the YES Network announced their partnership in January 2024 to form Gotham Advanced Media and Entertainment (GAME), a 50/50 joint venture owned by the two regional sports networks. A press release said that GAME would leverage “state-of-the-art streaming technology” to enhance existing streaming apps from YES and MSG and offer its technology to clients across other networks, teams, and sports properties. 

GAME went on to launch the Gotham Sports app in October as the new home of the New York Knicks, New York Rangers, New Jersey Devils, New York Islanders, Buffalo Sabres, Brooklyn Nets, and New York Yankees at a charge of $41.99 monthly, or $359.99 annually, with smaller packages available for MSG-only or YES-only subscriptions. Fans in the regional TV area with cable authentication for MSG Networks and YES can access Gotham Sports for free.

In the five months since its launch, fans have littered online platforms with issues using the Gotham Sports app. Fan complaints range from repeated authentication issues to video streams of live games not playing. X users have described the app as a “total nightmare”, “the worst app ever created,” “unusable” and a “massive piece of garbage.”

“It doesn’t matter when you look at Twitter, there’s just always people experiencing problems,” streaming media analyst Dan Rayburn told Awful Announcing. “They [Gotham] don’t have that much in the way of demand, this isn’t like they’re trying to deliver this to millions of users. It’s just a really poor development of the app and the service. The third-party company they’re using used to do a lot better work before they were acquired. It’s not the way to roll out an app.”  

Reddit channels for the Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Devils, and Yankees have threads of fans bemoaning the Gotham Sports app as being unusable across various streaming devices. “The problem is you can’t even get to the video — you can’t even login, the authentication is not working,” Rayburn said of fan experiences with the Gotham app. “The latency has been horrific. I’m seeing latency of some people talking about it being more than five minutes behind.”

In November, one Knicks fan shared on Reddit a purported response from the Gotham Sports app customer support. “I understand your frustration, especially after encountering issues on both Roku and Android TVs. It’s clear that many others are facing similar challenges, and we sincerely appreciate you taking the time to voice your concerns,” reads the post. “Gotham Sports is still a relatively new platform, and while we’re excited about its potential, we acknowledge that there are still bugs and performance issues that need to be addressed.”

For an industry that largely recognizes that fans are asked to pay for too many streaming services to watch their favorite teams, the bundle of YES and MSG Networks to form Gotham was praised around its launch. 

At the end of 2024, Sports Business Journal crowned MSG Networks as its Best in Local Media of the Year winner, posting that “MSG continues to lead with bold moves like the Gotham Sports App.” Front Office Sports referred to the streaming alliance between YES and MSG as “a significant turnaround from decades of acrimony” about historical tension between the Steinbrenner and Dolan families that own the Yankees and, Knicks & Rangers, respectively.

The social media backlash towards the app is also mirrored in ratings and reviews, or at least it was.

The Gotham Sports app on the Google Play store currently has a 2.2 rating from over 480 reviews and over 50,000 downloads.

When Awful Announcing started pursuing reporting for this story in early February, Gotham Sports had a 1.2 rating on Apple’s App Store. Three rounds of app updates since then have reset the app’s rating to a respectable 3.9 rating.

Despite the surge in positive ratings, recent reviews of the newer app seem to suggest problems still exist, with six recent written reviews all being one star.

App Store reviews of the Gotham Sports App
App Store reviews of the Gotham Sports App

These reviews call it the “worst app,” “useless,” “awful,” and “does not work.” The same is true on Google Play, where 19 of the last 21 reviews as of February 21st all rate the app at one star with a range of complaints saying that support is non-existent, so “don’t bother contacting them,” there is “garbage constant freezing.” Several users say they cannot access the app due to authentication and password issues. The other two reviews are five stars from “MSG Go” and five stars from someone with the same name as a Senior Designer at YES Network. Of the last 50 Google Play reviews for the app, 44 are rated at one star.

Neither YES Network nor MSG Networks has publicly acknowledged the depth of issues facing Gotham Sports app users. When approached by Awful Announcing regarding months of complaints from fans expressing their troubles with the Gotham Sports App, YES Network declined to comment.

Rayburn, Chairman of the NAB Show Streaming Summit, wrote a LinkedIn post four months ago that details technical issues and a discrepancy in subscription pricing listed on the Gotham Sports website versus its mobile app. Rayburn also questions the viability of the app to attract users given its expensive price point, noting that it does not include the ability to watch games from major NY sports teams such as the NFL’s Jets and Giants or MLB’s Mets. One of Rayburn’s critical LinkedIn posts did garner a response from Kevin Marotta, SVP Marketing and Content Strategy at MSG Networks Inc.

“Many users either forgot or didn’t know their login information that was ported over from the previous app(s), which led to a lot of these issues and queueing in care. We’ve worked hard to send folks their account emails to rectify this,” Marotta wrote on LinkedIn in response to Rayburn’s post.

“Streaming is hard, streaming real time at scale is very hard,” added Jed Corenthal, chief marketing officer at Phenix Real Time Solutions. “You saw that earlier in the year with the fight that Netflix had some issues with. But they have the wherewithal, knowledge, and resources to fix what they did. And for the Christmas NFL games, they clearly were exponentially better than what they were for the fight.”

While Gotham Sports has encountered struggles this NBA and NHL seasons, the app has about a month until Yankees games begin streaming on its platform. For sports fans within the NY-NJ-CT-PA regional market, hopefully, SNY’s upcoming direct-to-consumer service to stream Mets games in partnership with MLB will have a better rollout than Gotham Sports.

“They have larger problems with their business, and this app is not their core focus,” Rayburn said of the Gotham app owners. “So how much are you really going to invest in it to do it properly? Well, probably not what you need to because it’s not that important to your business. If it is that important to your business, they would be breaking out in their financial statements to Wall Street—what percentage of revenue comes from this new service? Have they done that? No,” he said about recent earnings reports from Sphere Entertainment., the holding company that owns MSG Networks and other Dolan-owned properties. 

“Sports leagues are not doing what we want as fans, they’re doing what’s best for the bottom line,” Rayburn added. “The leagues are doing what gets them the most money across the most platforms. They don’t care if you and I have to jump through hoops to try to get all this different stuff and can’t figure out where to get it. It’s irrelevant to them, they’re making money.”

Andrew Cohen has covered sports business and finance for publications such as Sports Business Journal, Front Office Sports, and Crain Currency. He is based in New York.