The RSN Streaming Playbook: Why Building from Scratch Isn’t the Answer

The Collapse of the Cable Bundle

The regional sports network model is broken. That much is obvious. What is less obvious — and far more interesting — is what comes next.

Diamond Sports, the largest RSN operator in the United States, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2023 carrying roughly $8 billion in debt. The company that held broadcast rights for 42 professional teams across MLB, NBA, and NHL simply could not outrun the collapse of the cable bundle. The math stopped working.

But here is what the bankruptcy obscured: demand for regional sports never went away. Fans did not stop caring about their local teams. They stopped paying for cable.

Cable subscribers in the US dropped from 85.4 million to 49.8 million — a 42% decline in five years. Cable penetration fell to roughly 44% of US TV households and is heading toward 33%.

That is not a blip. That is a structural shift. And it leaves every sports rights holder — teams, leagues, conferences — with the same question: how do we reach the fans who left cable?

The Graveyard of Go-It-Alone

The instinct for many has been to build their own streaming service. It sounds reasonable. You own the content. You want to own the relationship with the fan. You build an app, hire some engineers, license a video player, sign a CDN contract, and launch.

Then reality sets in.

Building a streaming service from scratch costs $3 to $10 million or more. It takes 12 to 18 months to get to market. And that is just the first version — before you deal with scaling, platform certification across Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, LG, and the rest, before you solve authentication, ad insertion, analytics, and customer support.

Meanwhile, the audience you are trying to reach is already there. 99% of Americans use the internet. 80% have broadband. They are watching content. They are just not watching yours, because you have not given them a way to.

The FanDuel Sports Networks — the successor brand to Bally Sports after Diamond’s restructuring — have faced their own existential questions. Reports from The Sporting Tribune indicated these networks were at risk of shutdown in late 2025. Multiple MLB teams — the Padres, Diamondbacks, Guardians, Twins, and Brewers — had already left Diamond after missed rights payments. The dominoes kept falling.

Every month spent building from scratch is a month of lost audience, lost revenue, and lost momentum.

The Partnership Model

There is another path. Instead of building a streaming service, you partner with someone who already built one.

This is not a theoretical argument. At APMC Sports, we operate Victory+, a live sports streaming platform that currently serves five teams across two leagues. We built the apps. We certified on 10 platforms. We integrated with TV providers. We solved ad insertion. We handle the operations on game night.

The infrastructure exists. The question for any rights holder is whether they want to spend years and millions recreating it, or whether they want to be live in weeks.

“Victory+ is seeing ‘many-x’ the audience of traditional media for live games. Advertisers are bidding 1.5x expected rates.”

This should not be surprising. Cable was a walled garden that required a $150/month subscription and a set-top box. Streaming is accessible to anyone with a phone, a smart TV, or a laptop. The addressable audience was always larger than cable could reach.

What the Data Actually Shows

The cable industry spent two decades telling sports rights holders that their content was the reason people subscribed to cable. That was true — and it made RSNs extraordinarily valuable inside the bundle. But it also created a dependency that obscured the real size of the audience.

When you put a live game on a free streaming platform with no cable subscription required, you discover that the actual demand for regional sports is multiples of what cable was delivering. Not incremental growth. Multiples.

The advertising market has noticed. When Victory+ games attract audiences that exceed what the same teams drew on cable, advertisers respond. Bidding at 1.5x expected rates is a market signal. It says the inventory is underpriced, the audience is engaged, and the opportunity is real.

Two Paths Forward

For rights holders looking at the streaming landscape, the options are clearer than they appear:

Path one: Victory+ partnership. Your games air on Victory+, alongside other professional teams and leagues. You get immediate access to a built platform, certified apps, an established ad sales operation, and a growing audience. You focus on your team, your fans, your content. We handle the technology and distribution.

Path two: White-label. You want your own brand, your own app, your own direct relationship with the fan — but you do not want to build the underlying platform. APMC provides the streaming infrastructure as a white-label service. Your brand, our engine. You are live in weeks instead of months.

Both paths lead to the same place: your content reaching the audience that already exists but that cable can no longer deliver.

The Clock Is Running

The RSN collapse is not a future event. It already happened. Diamond’s bankruptcy was in 2023. Cable has lost 42% of its subscribers. The FanDuel Sports Networks are fighting for survival. Teams are taking their rights back.

The question is not whether regional sports moves to streaming. It already has. The question is how fast each rights holder makes the transition — and how much audience and revenue they leave on the table while they deliberate.

Building from scratch is the slow, expensive, risky path. Partnering is the fast one.

We know because we did it. Victory+ is live. The games are streaming. The audience showed up. The advertisers followed.

Your fans are already online. The only question is whether you will meet them there.