Bailing Out From Bally Bankruptcy Could be Bombastic

While the nation prepares for the constant flow of March Madness games over the next two weeks, MLB is forced to get ready to take on the financial burden of streaming games to fans of as many as 14 teams. After days of rumors, the NY Post reports that the Bally Sports Regional Networks (currently owned by Diamond Sports) group is expected to file for bankruptcy within the coming week, allowing it to drop scheduled telecasts of the majority of games of the teams it holds the rights to.

The report has MLB taking over the production and offering local packages for fans within the team's current rights areas. This is significant because 14 teams is one short of half of MLB, and a bankruptcy likely impacts the individual teams' ability to collect millions of dollars in anticipated revenue. These regional networks also, in many cases, also have rights to NBA and/or NHL teams, whose telecasts would also be impacted.

This situation bears watching, not only because of the timing, but its potential significance involving millions of dollars in potentially lost revenue for teams in MLB, NBA, and NHL because of this.

 

Not sure what University of Colorado did to bring this on, but their spring football game will be shown on the main ESPN Network. What makes this "interesting" is that this will be the ONLY college spring game shown on the main network, for whatever reason. The University of Georgia spring game will air on ESPN2. However, other spring football game telecasts will appear only on ESPN+ and/or conference channels. Again, wondering how U of Colorado managed to pull this off.  

Another football related mystery involves the XFL, which we normally wouldn't pay attention to. Despite a noticeable decline in viewership over its first three weeks of games, the announcement as come that ESPN/ABC is moving a group of games "up" to its main platforms. Believe it or not, XFL games are now being scheduled to soon air on ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2.