OTish: Bally Sports+ is coming
Tigers, Pistons and Red Wings all streaming for $20 per month or $189 for a full year. Service launches Thursday.
It seems like this was the last big holdout for "cord cutters" to be able to get local Detroit/Michigan sports. Anyone planning to sign up?
I'd definitely sign up if it was available out of market....but it's not. I guess that I'll continue to watch the Red Wings on ESPN+ for $7.00 per month (during the season). It would, however, be nice to catch some Tigers games.
Would it though?
Hopefully the Riley Greene effect can continue to give the team a pulse for awhile here..
I watch out of market baseball through MLBtv. If you have tmobile, you can get it for free.
Guys! VPN a Detroit router and sign up.
Guys! VPN a Detroit router and sign up.
I'll let Bally Sports+ fix all the bugs before subscribing. By then, one of those three teams will hopefully put a winning product on the field/court/ice.
Similarly, I'll let Troy Weaver, Steve Yzerman, Whoever the next Tigers GM is going to be, work out all the kinks before I subscribe.
What/how can I get all Lions games? I love out of state.
NFL Sunday Ticket. I lived out of state for 4 years and never missed a Lions(or any other) game. I think it was $125 for the season when I used a student email.
Same here. Had it from 2000-2009. Sadly, I developed into a degenerate gambler watching all the other NFL games.
Unfortunately, you have to reside within the BSD coverage area. As an out of state Detroit fan, I would've signed up, since it would have been much cheaper than my current amalgamation of MLB Extra Innings, NHL Center Ice, and NBA League Pass.
Oh well.
MLB Extra Innings does have a team-specific package. Regular price is $99.99, but now it's 50% off. It's only $15 cheaper than the full package, so it's not a real savings. I would consider a team only plan (for the full season) if it was $50.
Funnily enough, I decided to splurge for the league wide plan this year because I figured the Tigers would be good enough to watch a couple times a week. Whoops.
Thankfully, the Mets and Padres are having good enough seasons to justify my investment. Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling are by far the best announcing crew in baseball. And watching the Padres games makes me nostalgic for when I lived in San Diego.
Having no way to watch has been a blessing in disguise for me.
None of the teams are worth watching.
You have to reside within the BSD coverage area If i am in the Milwaukee BSD area than I would be stuck with all Milwaukee games than ? If that is the case they need to get this fixed otherwise this is gonna be a big fail. I assume I would be stuck with all Milwaukee / Wisconsin games and than it is of no use to me
I get the Braves games here in Atlanta. When they aren’t playing, we get fishing shows, WNBA games, and second/third tier SEC and ACC sports. Get an MLB subscription and watch baseball until your heart is content. I’ll watch a A’s/Mariners game… if the announcers are decent.
thats a brutally steep price. exciting time to be a wings and pistons fan but this is comical
It's basically the cost to take a family of four to one tigers game. It at least frees me from directv stream and their garbage app.
Since a couple posters have commented about needing to be in the BSD coverage area, here's a map of Bally Sports' coverage areas:
I guess Bally Sports says F you to da U.P., eh?
you say coverage area, so if your in Wisconsin you only get Wisconsin games than ?
Sadly, I'd expect that you'd only get Bally Sports Wisconsin programming. The article says you get a 7-day free trial, so you could sign up and see what happens.
If you're just into Detroit sports, this sounds like a pretty decent deal if you live in Michigan. A digital antenna for lions games, and $20/month for the other big league teams, is a pretty great deal.
If you want to watch anything else tho - BTN or ESPN, let alone any other games in your favorite sport - I imagine cable is probably a better deal for most. I've come to terms with the fact that streaming hasn't made consumption better for most users. It's certainly helped niche sports get more traction but for fans of the big leagues in the local market of their team, things have gotten more expensive, and will continue to. It's now rare to be able to watch the game on channel 4 or any other terrestrial channel - unless the tigers happen to be on the Fox saturday game or something.
Trying to get rid of cable. But when I look for packages that include local and national sports as well as internet. It ends up being about the same price. Any ideas?
Honestly at this point just keep cable. Maybe directTv because you can bundle your mobile provider with it? No idea but cord cutting just seems like a farce nowadays.
Totally depends on whether you have to have something all the time. For me streaming saves me a lot of money. I spend $65/mo for 3 months during Football season. I buy ESPN+ for 4-5 months for hockey Jan-Apr/May.
I get Discovery+ for $3 a month and usually one other service of some sort for $5-$10 a month for the wife. Most of them don't have enough content to keep for more than a couple months anyway. Just rotate through when the prior service lapses.
All this costs about the same as maybe 4 months of normal cable? And you can't get just 4 months of normal cable, it's always 12 or 24 or something.
Though you also have to factor in how much more cable companies charge you for internet when you don't also get cable channels through them. Adding 70-80 cable channels on top of what I was already paying for internet during attempted cord cutting only cost me an extra 25 dollars a month because of their bundle.
They know if you're getting -just- internet you're supporting their rivals for content so they get ya with that price.
That may be true for some providers, but even the cheapest plan added to my internet is $55 a month. With a 12 month contract of course. Plus taxes, and fees etc.
Sounds like too much work.
It depends on where you live and what you want, but be open to cable being the best option.
Personally, I live in Cali, and share YTTV with some family members in the local area - even if I didn't share, it would be the cheapest way to get BTN and ESPN and the local NBC Sports stations. Also it's a monthly commitment, so before I shared I'd cancel it during the months where M wasn't playing. I'd say that's its biggest advantage - like turning on and off Bally Sports based on how much you're watching it makes a ton of sense.
But if you live in a place where cable is less than $65/month, and if you want to watch sports all year long, I think it's probably the best option.
Also - you can get your local NFL games with a solid digital antenna, and a fair amount of CFB games.
I believe most regional sports networks are not on YTTV - the NBC RSNs are an exception. If you live in a Balley Sports market, the only way to get the Balley Sports RSN is through a cable sub or this...
I've kept cable, too. My biggest issue is that I DVR a lot of games to free up my weekends and early evenings. I can spend time with the family and/or getting work done around the house, then spend an hour at night watching the Michigan-Northwestern football game instead of giving up 3.5 hours of prime weekend time.
I haven't found any of these streaming services to be able to meet that need.
I think most of the stream-TV services include cloud-DVRs, if that's what's holding you back. But honestly...streaming tv works for me but it's really not that different than cable.
I'll probably just stick with the Directv Stream package that includes Bally Sports. It's about $90 a month and it has all of the other sports channels (BTN, ESPN, etc.) I need. I liked YTTV ($65/mo.) a little better than Directv Stream but it's not worth switching and picking up Bally Sports+ just to save $5.
I may have "cut the cord" but I'm basically paying the same as I did before I went to the streaming services. I guess the advantage is that I'm not locked into a plan and pay month to month.
I'd consider DirectTV stream, but I have a very unobstructed view to the south, no way to get Sunday Ticket without the dish, and that isn't happening again.
I had Directv back in the day and loved it. But the cost had gone to just north of $150 a month and they were no longer willing to work with me on bringing down the price. (Plus it was getting annoying trying to haggle on price every 6 months.)
We've bounced around from Hulu to YTTV and Directv Stream...they all have their pros and cons but I will say Stream has improved their interface and now also have unlimited DVR.
Question for anyone in the know.
As far as I knew Bally's as a brand has been dead for decades. I did several projects for Bally's Health & Tennis Corp somewhere around 1989-91 at their headquarters and satellite locations as well as all their gyms around SoCal doing IT work. I think their gyms were a national chain. Far as I knew they were all sold off to other companies many years ago.
Other than the fact that they have one of the older casinos on the LV strip I hadn't heard their name in ages. Then suddenly they take over, or are re-branded, on all Fox Sports networks. Fox certainly has a much bigger brand name. I doubt most people under 40 even know what I'm talking about or ever heard of Bally's unless they're a Vegas regular.
Bally did make a shit ton of pinball machines and other arcade games back in the day. Doubt that is how they rose from the ashes.
So WTF happened? How did Bally's make this resurgence? Far as I know Harrah's and MGM swing the biggest dicks and I don't think Bally's is associated.
Your question interested me so I did a quick search, it looks like they just have the naming rights for the sports network for the next ten years. That being said, they have been aggressively expanding since 2014, buying ownership stakes in a lot of smaller casinos. I also think they have profited greatly from the expansion of online gambling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bally%27s_Corporation
I've looked into it a bit too and like I stated have some history with the company. It's been a head scratcher for me. Kinda thought they were dead and gone for the most part.
We all know ESPN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS sports. Then in one fell swoop - Bally. Thought I'd throw it out there if someone knew some insider baseball on it.
It's for sure the same company, logo, brand.
I think the big thing was when they had to file for bankruptcy in 2009/2010. The new ownership consisted of Bank of America and Wells Fargo amongst others. Instead of people flailing around not really knowing what they were doing they got a group with much more of a direction and a plan.
Ballys Las Vegas is actually owned by Caesars Entertainment. Same logo yes but not the same Ballys that owns the sports networks.
That Vegas hotel also used to be the MGM Grand. It’s the same physical hotel that had the terrible fire that killed nearly 100 in 1980. The new MGM Grand is now further south down the Strip.
Also Ballys Las Vegas will be rebranded as Horseshoe Las Vegas later this year. They will also cohost the WSOP starting this year - it’s no more at the Rio.
It is all kind of a corporate mess ha ha. Nothing stays constant in Vegas for long.
Sinclair owns these stations. Bally's pays for the naming rights, to promote their sports betting business.
Get DirecTV stream. It’s $89 a month for all the cable channels plus Bally Sports Detroit. If the primary account is in Michigan, you can stream BSD on the same account out of state. Highly recommend.
when I first moved to PA and couldn't get Michigan local sports programming (fox sports detroit, at that time) .... I overheard my neighbors, who were retired and lived the snowbird life, talking about calling direct tv to let them know they were going to be in TX from January to May.... I asked what it mattered to Dtv? They said, well they change our service address, just not the billing address, that way we get local tv for news and weather..... Got my attention....
I called Dtv and asked them if I could do the same, if I were to be in southern Michigan attending college.... sure enough, worked like magic. i gave them a friend's address in Pinckney as my temporary address, kept my billing address in PA and they switched over my programing to local for zip code 48169. Got to catch all the Tiger's and Red Wings programing on Fox Detroit, plus the Lions on broadcast (for comic relief, was never a Lion's fan)
I have been seeing the ads for direct tv stream, how is the channel quality is it a certain package of channels you get or all of them and the pay channels also? I have direct tv, but if that is a cheaper route to go.
They have different packages. I pay $105/mth for a package that has a lot of channels. I've had it for almost 2 years and the problem I have with it is the app on roku. There are a lot sound leveling issues. Also, the general interface isn't as good as some of the other services I've tried (youtube tv and fubo). I'll likely switch back to one of those two and buy the bally's service.
Confused...I already get Bally and all the Tigers games through Comcast. Is this putting those games behind a wall, or will I still have them?
I'm not paying $189 per year for this.
I think this is just another way for people who dont have Comcast to get the Bally programming. I was a little worried when i saw this title that games were going to start getting moved from the regular channels to the Balley+ channel that costs extra money (sort of like how Peacock is now doing for select games) but I dont think thats what is happening, yet at least.
Yes, or like when some of our games get moved to BTN+
It's Bally Sports +. It is an extra service for those who don't get Bally sports thru cable, etc. I think it works something like BTN+ if you are familiar with that.