The pay-TV ecosystem has sidestepped the launch of Venu Sports, at least for now, but we'll be watching to see if it can thwart what appears to be a very formidable competitive threat.
Local television broadcasts of nearly every major professional sports team in the New York area will be available through a new direct-to-consumer streaming app launching this fall under Gotham Advanced Media & Entertainment (GAME), a joint venture formed earlier this year by Yes Network and MSG Networks.
Non-nationally broadcast games from the New York Yankees, New York Knicks, New York Rangers, New Jersey Devils, New York Islanders, Buffalo Sabres and Brooklyn Nets will be available on the service, billed as “the exclusive TV Everywhere and DTC streaming home on MSG+ and the YES app.”
As the chart below shows, this combined service offers significant savings over subscribing to just the individual apps, and it's free for subscribers to the linear YES and MSG networks.
The Gotham Sports app can be downloaded by visiting www.Signup.GothamSports.com and is supported on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, iOS, Android TV and most web browsers.
“With fan-favorite sports programming distributed across multiple media outlets, the Gotham Sports app provides one easy place for our teams' fans to access New York-area sporting events from MSG Network and YES Network,” Andrea Greenberg, president and CEO of MSG Network, said in a statement.