March to Victory : A Parent Media Company Starts From Scratch To Give Dallas Stars, Anaheim Ducks a New Broadcast Home AVOD service features new graphics package, studio shows from PGA of America facility By Kristian Hern ndez, Senior Editor Monday, October 14, 2024 - 12:06 pm
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On Saturday, Oct. 12, Dallas Stars fans watched their favorite hockey team's first home game, against the New York Islanders, on a new medium: the advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) service named Victory . The platform also hosts Anaheim Ducks games, with additional over-the-air distribution on KTTV Los Angeles and KCOP-TV Los Angeles. With both teams turning to A Parent Media Company (APMC) for help, the entire production and operations strategy was put together and launched before the start of the 2024-25 NHL season.
Anytime you're doing something of the size and scope as this, it's nerve-wracking, says Jason Walsh, COO, sports, A Parent Media Company. We've done a few games, and we've already far surpassed what we thought we were going to see.
Victory is the new streaming home of the NHL's Dallas Stars and Anaheim Ducks.
Amid the Turmoil: Diamond Sports Group Turmoil Gets the Wheels Turning The state of media rights in sports is evolving, but that of regional sports is the most complex. Diamond Sports Group - the company responsible for operating the Bally Sports Regional Networks - is experiencing hard times, forcing professional teams under its umbrella to search for new ways of broadcasting and distribution to audiences. Walsh, who served as VP and executive producer at Bally Sports Southwest for eight years, understood possible scenarios. To see if there was a different avenue for the club, he also tapped into a decade as VP, production and entertainment, for Dallas Stars. In early 2023, Walsh and APMC CEO/President Neil Gruninger sat down with Stars CEO/President Brad Alberts, a longtime investor in APMC, to kick-start conversations. The Victory app would come to life just three weeks later.
Extra content available to fans includes postgame interviews, playoff recaps, classic games, and special player features.
This isn't APMC's first foray into live streaming and being the home of a brand's content. The company's Kidoodle.TV service has presented content from child-focused shows like Paw Patrol, Bubble Guppies, Peppa Pig, and Cocomelon. More recently, Dude Perfect, the Texas-based content company known for mind-bending trick shots, teamed up with APMC in late 2023 to debut its streaming offering.
Despite this history of successful live streaming and the capability of quickly transforming Victory from an idea into a plausible broadcast option, Walsh had qualms about the project's longevity: To be honest, I was quite skeptical of the situation because throughout my entire career, all I heard was that AVOD was not going to be a viable [financial] solution. Now it's not going to just be about the teams' making money but more about their controlling their own destiny.
Before officially making the leap to APMC in April 2024, Walsh picked Gruninger's brain, asking every question he had. His initial reservations disappeared after multiple meetings and conversations, but, once the Dallas Stars announced in July 2024 that they were leaving Bally Sports Southwest and the Anaheim Ducks a month later announced its plan to move on from Bally Sports West, the big task was to get everything in order prior to puck drop in October.
The platform's new graphics package features a Chyron Prime scorebug and a permanent Time on Ice bar.
We didn't even have a camera or a microphone at that point, notes Walsh. I asked myself, How are we going to produce professional sports in five months?'
The Avengers Assemble: Execs Join the Company Before Takeoff Flying the Victory plane required a top-tier flight crew. Scrolling through his list of contacts, Walsh went to work on choosing his broadcasting team. The top two selections were Bally Sports Southwest colleagues: VP, Operations, Dawn Esposito and VP, Content Production, Greg Flick, who had served as director of operations and coordinating producer, respectively, at the RSN.
Next, Walsh needed to recruit trusted tech vendors that would bring legitimacy to the broadcasts. Esposito and Flick were onboarded, and, a week later, Walsh and his new team were at NAB 2024 in Las Vegas. Roaming the Las Vegas Convention Center, they saw solutions that caught their eye but ultimately went in a direction incorporating many of the workflows used by their previous employer.
Graphics are easily switched between the Ducks' Orange County-themed bright orange and the Stars' Victory Green.
At the end of the day, says Walsh, the broadcast-production [side of the business] wasn't broken; the economics of the RSN business were broken. We knew we could go with some of the same [vendors] that we've always trusted.
Thus, APMC tapped Mobile TV Group as primary mobile-unit provider, Chyron for the graphics package, Sportradar for data integration, and others to round out its tech portfolio. Finding the partners was the easiest part; more difficult was having traditional-broadcast executives learn the intricacies of modern-day live streaming. The other side of the coin is true: APMC's live-streaming experts needed to learn live event production with a broadcast lens.
The countdown to puck drop includes photos from the Stars' 1999 Stanley Cup-winning team.
We began to teach one another about how we each worked and started to find some really exciting opportunities right away, Walsh explains. There are infinite channels with streaming, and, being in Texas, I've suggested a Spanish version of the broadcast where fans can sele
