Many Timberwolves fans and national sports fans in general already had a hate relationship with Bally Sports prior to this week.
Issues with the Bally Sports Plus app, which prevented local users from watching Wolves on Monday and Wednesday and national users from watching various other games, only compounded the problem.
The Bally Sports Help account on We will work quickly to identify and resolve the issue. We will let you know when service is restored.”
The account sent a follow-up tweet at 8:40 p.m. Wednesday saying the issue had been resolved. But the Wolves’ victory over Denver was almost over at this point.
The app also experienced a similar outage on Monday, and Bally Sports followed up on Tuesday to “assure our viewers that the issue has been resolved.” This stability apparently lasted for a day.
Frustrated fans can be forgiven for being somewhere between skeptical and angry, especially those who pay $20 a month as app subscribers. You can count me in, as I mentioned on Thursday’s Daily Delivery podcast.
(For what it’s worth, I was able to log into the app when I tried Thursday morning. Maybe we can watch the Wild game tonight?)
The outages potentially underscore larger problems with streaming sports — something sports media experts Andrew Marchand of the New York Post and John Ourand of Sports Business Journal talked about on their Sports Media Podcast earlier this week.
They took turns calling YouTube’s problems last Sunday with their NFL Sunday Ticket stream and Monday’s problems with the Bally Sports app a “disaster.” The podcast went live on Wednesday before the problems with the Bally app.
Ourand noted that people who watched “good, old-fashioned TV” weren’t affected by the Bally problems, something my good friend Jason DeRusha always points out when I complain about streaming problems.
The issues that streaming can cause with buffering, third-party providers, and other factors can affect the reliability of apps. This unreliability is the “main reason I’m so skeptical of streaming as an answer to cord cutting,” Ourand said in the podcast.
Marchand, meanwhile, was recently in the Twin Cities to watch a Vikings and Wild game with friends. While he was here, he went on what he called a “listening tour” with local fans. His takeaways were very familiar.
“They hate Bally Sports. Nobody had anything nice to say about Bally Sports,” Marchand said of Minnesota fans, noting that he has spoken to several who watch sports on illegal streams.
He also encountered Iowa fans who are frustrated that Twins games are blocked in their market. Ourand said MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has “made it very clear that they want to get rid of these blackouts. … This is ongoing,” especially as Bally Sports and other regional sports networks lose rights to teams.
“No one will miss Bally Sports,” Marchand said. “People want a clean, clear way to get their games easily and at a reasonable price. I think the price is designed to keep people hooked up.”
All of this is interesting to consider as Bally Sports’ parent company, Diamond Sports, continues its bankruptcy process and the Twins look to determine their local TV provider in 2024 and beyond following their 12-year deal with Bally Sports North recently expired.
Bundling the Twins, Wild, Wolves and Lynx and other programs makes perfect sense – but only if all games are reliably available in all formats.
Here are four more things you should know today:
*Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah spoke to reporters on Wednesday for the first time since the start of the season. Perhaps the most interesting topic: Adofo-Mensah seemed more focused on what the Vikings didn’t do — namely trading Danielle Hunter — than on the two moves they did make.
*Big Ten coaches are CRAZY about Jim Harbaugh and Michigan. This is going to be good.
*The main topic of today’s podcast was Gophers men’s basketball, with guest Marcus Fuller of the Star Tribune. The Gophers play a preseason game tonight against Macalester and open the regular season on Monday against Bethune-Cookman. You can read Fuller’s story about the great man Pharrel Payne here.
*After their impressive win over the Nuggets on Wednesday, the Wolves will have our full attention on Friday’s show with beat writer Chris Hine.
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