Tim Reynolds at the AP —
The Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers are moving their local broadcasts to Scripps Sports, leaving financially troubled Bally Sports and bringing the club’s games into more homes on a regular basis than ever before.
Interest for the team in Miami is higher than ever and the response is not to try and funnel those eyeballs into a blackout/monetization scheme, but rather to make their games more accessible to the public. Someone in Miami gets it.
There will be over-the-air channels in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Fort Myers markets, where viewers can watch the Panthers for most of their regular-season games and their first-round games in the NHL playoffs. Also part of the deal: games on basic cable and satellite, as well as offerings on a new team-branded, direct-to-consumer streaming app. The app will be ready in October for the start of the 2024-25 season, the Panthers said.
“We want to ensure that we’re addressing the heightened demand for our team and our sport, and we want to accelerate that growth,” Mark Zarthar, the Panthers’ chief strategy officer, said Tuesday. “And so, what is the next big step for us is making the viewership of our games much more accessible? With Scripps as an over-the-air provider, they will help us reach over 2.6 million households.”
With over-the-air channels being accessible by anyone, and now having the ability to transmit 4K content, this is the correct move. Providing an app for fans who are traveling or live out of town is a fair compliment to the free offering in-region. The question is, will it work?
Florida will become the third NHL team to partner with Scripps, joining Vegas and Utah.
“We found a partner that not only can provide us with a tremendous amount of reach and accessibility, but they’ve proven that they can do it because it works in Vegas,” Zarthar said.
With Vegas being a new-ish market, and Utah being completely new, we can’t yet say this will prove to be a winning strategy. The novelty of hockey in Utah is going to inflate their numbers for a couple of years. But getting data from more than just one team will go a long way towards helping other sports teams determine if they can follow a similar course.
Along with the Dallas Stars efforts to move away from Diamond Sports, it will be interesting to watch these marketing experiments play out in real time. But so far, the underlying foundation to these new strategies involves being able to maximize reach and eliminate blackouts. Better late than never.