Streaming app to watch the Mavs, Rangers and Stars may include an outrageous price

Two of the great challenges of the last year have been how to properly wear a mask over your nose and mouth, and trying to watch the Texas Rangers, Dallas Mavericks or Dallas Stars game on your TV.

The battle between Sinclair Broadcast Group and the majority of the cable carriers and the “cord cutters,” has left hundreds of thousands of fans of the Rangers, Mavs and Stars unable to watch the games on the network formerly known as Fox Sports Southwest.

Renamed Bally Sports Southwest, all of those games that you missed will soon be available to you on a streaming app, for a price that you won’t believe.

According to a report in The New York Post, Sinclair is gathering money in an effort to launch a Bally Sports streaming app with a subscription price of $23 a month.

That would be the most expensive major streaming app available.

Now, here is the “fun” part: According to the Post, this $23 a month will only cover the “games in markets where it owns sports broadcasting rights, sources said.”

Bally Sports, via Sinclair, owns the broadcast rights to 42 teams, from MLB, NBA, NHL, WNBA to MLS.

But your $23 would not allow you to watch the teams carried on networks such as Bally Sports South, Bally Sports SoCal, etc.; instead, that $23 would cover the teams in your market.

By comparison, a standard subscription for Netflix is $13.99 a month. Hulu, without adds, is $11.99 per month.

Disney+ is $8 a month. A subscription that includes Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ bundles can be had at $14 a month.

HBOMax is $14.99 a month, without adds.

Sinclair hopes to make this app available before the start of the 2022 MLB season.

It’s worth noting that there is nothing the Dallas Stars, Texas Rangers, Dallas Mavericks or any franchise that signed a local TV broadcast rights agreement years ago with then Fox Sports can do about any of this.

There are always a buffet of reasons to be upset with the local teams, and this is not one of them. This is all on Sinclair looking to squeeze more money out of your wallet.

Sinclair acquired the 21 Fox Sports regional networks from Disney for $9.6 billion in August 2019.

Fans didn’t notice that. They noticed last year when the contracts between Sinclair and Hulu, YouTubeTV and most other cable carriers expired, and suddenly the games were gone.

You can still watch the local teams if you have DirecTV, Spectrum or TVMax, or much smaller carriers available in mostly rural areas.

Sinclair publicly said it simply wanted to charge a similar rate to the Hulus of the world, but in reality the plan was to launch its own streaming app.

The stunner is a potential price point that far exceeds a norm by other streaming services that offer a far larger menu.

In the last 30 plus years, sports and sports TV has done nothing but grow, while charging more for the product. Sports is entertainment, but it offers something that a TV show or movie cannot.

It’s the shared experience of watching a live event where the outcome has not been manipulated by an editor, director or producer. Plus, you can bet on this form of entertainment whereas you can’t put down a $20 on the Friends Reunion special.

Industry observers have wondered break point will finally prompt consumers to not only leave, but never to return.

We don’t know. So far no number has been too high.

Perhaps Sinclair is floating this figure to see the reaction and will adjust accordingly. If there is enough outrage, it may drop that number.

Because $23 a month to watch the Rangers, Mavs and Stars feels awfully high when you can spend half that for everything Disney has to offer.