Follow me on Twitter Follow @TheJeremyLaura

BREAKING: The Diamond Sports subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcast Group has skipped a $140 million debt payment https://t.co/n6rBLQLYnN

— Sportico (@Sportico) February 15, 2023

If you read through the article, there is a 30 day grace period. You will also find out that this was an interest payment on 9 billion in debt. Company says they expect regional sports to be unaffected, but it was mentioned that they are looking at bankruptcy filing.


I recently wrote about ESPN being looked at very closely as Disney broke the sports platform into a separate branch. There was a Governor’s call today, and thankfully ESPN doesn’t seem to be the subject. Bally’s sports is.

Pro Hockey Rumors did a quick synopsis of the call. Bally missed a 140mm payment and could be headed for bankruptcy. If you remember, the NBC deal was 220million. The league wanted more, but declining viewership had NBC walk away as ESPN and Bally came in with a combined 550m tv deal.

I noticed that when games were exclusively streamed, the announcers tried to walk people through how to get to ESPN+. We saw the Bally sets slowly change and some format differences. This week has been a rough week for the companies that bought out the Fox sports and entertainment properties. Disney paid somewhere under 70billion for fox entertainment and bought Marvel and Star Wars as well.

No one knows what this means, but shifting media platforms isn’t as easy as it seems. The most sensible option would seem that if Bally does indeed go under, ESPN is already co broadcasting many of the games. Unfortunately, ESPN has its own issues but is a more recognizable IP. All this comes after finding out that viewership is down around 100k per game from last year.

Nearly every streaming service had losses at the end of the year with NETFLIX showing its first net loss in 10 years. Regardless, just keep your eyes and ears open. The television revenue only makes up about 10% of the HRR that’s based on the 5 billion in revenue a few years back. About 550 million. But, Netflix had to refund ad revenues when there was subscriber loss. I have no idea where this all leads to. Hopefully, just a shift and possibly a revision to the MOU (temporary of course).

Join the Discussion: » 6 Comments » Post New Comment

» Griffins advance after 4-2 win in Rockford in game 4 of round 1

» Larkin injured, Augustine in, Toronto trade talk taking over ignores detail

» Post playoff overspend, and would anyone take a discounted Bert back?

» Berggren’s OT winner caps off exciting game 3 for Griffins

» Thoughts on Seider and Raymond, Griffins look to take series lead, updates