The courtship lasted all of three weeks, which in the deliberate world of sports media rights negotiations qualifies as something between a whirlwind romance and a speed date.
Victory+, the free streaming service that has been assembling a portfolio of women's basketball properties with notable haste, announced a deal to carry the Atlanta Dream's local games this season, following its recent agreement with the Minnesota Lynx. The announcement came just days before Saturday's season opener, in which the Dream will face — in one of those scheduling coincidences that television executives tend to appreciate — the Lynx themselves.
Katie Boes, Victory+'s chief content officer, first contacted Andrea Bailey, the Dream's chief revenue officer, on April 14. The resulting one-year contract contains no minimum guarantee but includes an advertising revenue share arrangement, a structure that has become the service's calling card as it courts teams while simultaneously courting investors.
(The "no minimum guarantee" part is doing rather a lot of work in that sentence.)
Unlike the Lynx agreement, the Dream's games will also be simulcast on WANF Atlanta News First, a Gray Media station, and produced by Rush Media Company rather than Victory+ itself — a concession to the abbreviated timeline, Ms. Bailey said.
The Dream enter the arrangement as a franchise of notable contrasts: coming off a 30-win season, their best in team history, while playing in the league's smallest venue (3,500 seats at Gateway Center Arena) and generating the second-lowest average gate receipts in the W.N.B.A. last year. The addition of Angel Reese has increased attention considerably; the streaming deal represents an attempt to convert that attention into revenue.
"If you've obviously followed what's happening with the R.S.N.s, there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow right now where there used to be," Ms. Bailey said, in what may qualify as the understatement of the current sports media landscape.
For Victory+, which is actively pursuing deals with three to five N.B.A. teams while seeking financing, the W.N.B.A. agreements serve a purpose beyond their immediate value: they are, in effect, a proof of concept being demonstrated in public. The service will station an employee in Atlanta dedicated solely to Dream advertising sales.
Whether the model proves sustainable remains, as these things tend to, a matter for future earnings calls to reveal.
Original story published in sportsbusinessjournal.com: "Victory+ adds Atlanta Dream to its WNBA portfolio"