FanDuel Rebrands Bally Sports Networks Across the U.S.

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00:00Valley is no longer the branded name of the regional sports networks across the country.

00:08It is now FanDuel.

00:09We're starting to see some of the coverage come in, especially in the National Basketball

00:14Association and National Hockey Leagues over the last 48 hours.

00:17What do you make of this new branding?

00:18Yeah, it's something we kind of knew was coming for a long time, Craig, was that Valley's

00:23sports was no longer going to be Valley sports.

00:27FanDuel was linked to them a couple of months ago, but you had their holding company, Diamond

00:31Sports was in this bankruptcy case, which it kind of held up changing the name or selling

00:36off these naming rights to anybody else.

00:38But what happens is FanDuel ultimately comes out as the company who buys the 16 regional

00:44sports networks, like you alluded to, that include many local Major League Baseball,

00:49many local National Basketball Association games as well.

00:53So now it's all called FanDuel Sports Network, and it's really interesting considering FanDuel

00:58is kind of the net brand that's chosen to sort of build its own media empire with FanDuel

01:03TV, with the TVG horse racing channels that they had previously and turned over while

01:09you have other companies like Penn investing in other third party media, you could say

01:14with ESPN bet and DraftKings even a bit with Visa and a couple of the other brands they've

01:19worked with.

01:20Now you have these 16 networks, if you turn on NBA, NBA League Pass, MLB TV, and you go

01:27to one of these out of market games, you'll see the FanDuel Sports Network branded in

01:31the corner.

01:32So it really puts them at the intersection of one of the largest group of RSNs in the

01:37country, the way most people watch sports in their own market.

01:41And a lot of people watch games across the country.

01:44You'll be able to stream games locally through the FanDuel Sports Network website or via

01:50an app possibly that could be on the way that FanDuel is working on as well.

01:55So you can get a monthly seasonal annual subscription plan.

01:59There's no right now, there's no plan to really have this turn these valley sports channels

02:03into big betting centric broadcast just because you have FanDuel on there doesn't mean they're

02:08going to be talking about betting.

02:10It was similar with Bally's, which obviously had its own sports betting venture, and they

02:14lost a lot of money doing it.

02:16There's a reason that Bally's got out of this business.

02:18I want to give up the RSN.

02:20So I think that's a pretty interesting wrinkle here as well.

02:23While you have a lot of companies getting out of the media game, a lot of sports betting

02:26companies, you have FanDuel saying, OK, we'll take the investment, we'll go in, we'll try

02:30to see what we can do with this thing.

02:33Interestingly enough, in the bankruptcy case, which ultimately ended up kind of deciding

02:37or shaking out to this point where FanDuel comes out on top as the new brand name of

02:44these TV channels, an MLB attorney kind of criticized the fact that sports betting was

02:51getting closer to the game, saying he doesn't think that they should have a role in how

02:56you view content or you view the sports content.

02:58So interesting, given the fact that FanDuel obviously has a relationship with the MLB

03:03and we've seen this intersection of sports and sports betting within the media landscape

03:07just expand and expand.

03:09So a huge move for FanDuel here and one of many big media moves they've made recently.

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