A Parent Media Company has dissolved its premium streaming sports business Victory Plus after the company lost the rights to carry games from a number of professional teams.
The Dallas Morning News first reported the shutdown on Wednesday, citing an email sent to multiple North Texas school districts. The service will no longer carry the Texas High School Coaches Association Game of the Week, including a planned Prosper at North Forney broadcast this week. Victory Plus also canceled its Week 1 broadcast of Humble Summer Creek at Shadow Creek.
The shutdown comes after the Dallas Stars hockey team moved toward a local streaming deal with Prime Video for the upcoming National Hockey League (NHL) season. The Stars were a foundational partner in Victory Plus, which launched in 2024 as a free ad-supported sports streaming service. The team also held an equity stake in the platform.
The Stars’ exit followed a series of high-profile departures: The Texas Rangers left Victory Plus in July for a new streaming platform called BZZR after raising concerns about the company’s financial commitments. The Anaheim Ducks left the platform the same day, despite having two years remaining on their agreement. The NWSL later pulled its matches from Victory Plus after the platform missed a rights payment, shifting those games to NWSL Plus.
Victory Plus’ board later removed Chief Executive Officer Neil Gruninger and installed Jon Spencer, a board member at TriWest Capital Partners, in his place. Remaining partners were said at the time to include the Stars, the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx and Atlanta Dream, League One Volleyball and Texas high school football.
Those arrangements are now effectively over. Sports Business Journal reported that Stars President and Chief Executive Officer Brad Alberts said Victory Plus had terminated its remaining employees and filed for receivership in Canada.
Alberts said the Stars had not received “98 percent” of the money the team was owed over the past year. He said the team lost money in the “double-digit millions” and cited “financial mismanagement,” according to the report.
The collapse also creates uncertainty for Texas high school sports: Victory Plus had a five-year deal to stream the UIL Texas high school football state championships in an agreement brokered by Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, the UIL’s marketing arm. A new rights plan for those championships has not been announced.
The end of Victory Plus marks the latest chapter in the story of sports rights moving to streaming platforms with mixed results. Most teams did not rely on Victory Plus as the only option to access games, with some striking deals with local broadcasters to simulcast their competitions in order to reach more sports fans.
Other platforms like Apple TV, YouTube and Netflix have siphoned sports away from traditional TV networks, with mixed results. Earlier this year, Major League Soccer (MLS) reported a bump in viewership for its games on Apple TV after two years of notable silence over the platform’s audience. The ratings data came after Apple TV began distributing MLS games on traditional TV platforms like DIRECTV and Comcast’s Xfinity through one-off deals with those providers.
YouTube offered a National Football League (NFL) game in Brazil last year that scored remarkably low global ratings; in the United States, its viewership was well behind that of NBC’s kickoff game aired and streamed one day earlier.
For local sports, the dissolution of a broadcast partner has larger ramifications: Teams are scrambling to ink deals with other platforms and distributors to continue offering their games on TV.
Prime Video announced local streaming rights to six NHL teams, including the Stars, Ducks, Blue Jackets, Blues, Hurricanes and Wild, adding to an existing deal with the Seattle Kraken. DAZN has separately added local rights for several NBA teams and regional sports networks.
