The DALLAS MORNING NEWS goes with, "How Mavs TV was born and why the Mavericks took a $53 million loss to create it." On Sept. 6, two weeks after their mutual parting from Bally Southwest, the Mavericks franchise "chose an ambitious, risky and expensive path into the volatile frontier of sports broadcasting." Had the Mavericks remained with Bally Sports, like 13 other NBA teams did after Bally’s parent company, Diamond Sports, emerged from bankruptcy, they would have received $45M in rights fees. The projected cost of creating Mavs TV is $8M -- so far. Compensating for the shortfall "will be a challenge," but the franchise’s new majority ownership -- Miriam Adelson and Patrick and Sivan Dumont -- "committed to Mavs TV for a one-word reason: Fans." National and regional TV money is the "lifeblood of pro sports franchises," but ultimately the Mavericks "determined that unhappy fans and a constrained regional TV audience was counterproductive to the franchise’s well-being, if not its bottom line."
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