Phoenix Suns Launch ‘Suns Live’ DTC Streaming Option
As the regional sports landscape continues to shift, the Phoenix Suns have become the latest team to break away from bundled channels to offer their own standalone streaming service. Suns Live is available for $14.99/month or $109.99/year.
The monthly plan offers live preseason and regular season games, full-game replays, and original content. The annual plan includes all of that and a T-shirt.
The service is only available on web browsers.
The team had previously announced that every non-nationally televised game would be available to Phoenix-area fans for free on on 3TV (KTVK) and the newly-launched Arizona’s Family Sports (KPHE) network. Those channels would be available with an antenna. But in the event you can’t get the channel over the air, Suns Live would be an option.
If you live outside Arizona, you can watch Suns games on NBA League Pass. That service allows you to follow just one team or the entire league.
The Suns Live announcement comes after the Utah Jazz announced its own DTC streamer, Jazz+. That service is slightly more expensive at $15.50/month or $125.50/year.
All of this shuffling adds to a chaotic scramble for sports rights. Major media companies know that live sports are essentially the only thing keeping linear television alive. Of the 100 most-watched programs of 2022, 94 were sporting events. Because of this leverage, teams and leagues are asking sky-high prices to carry the games.
As the prices rise, some players are exiting the space entirely. Warner Bros. Discovery got out of the regional sports network business entirely. But the company is adding sports to Max under the Bleacher Report banner. Bally Sports abandoned the Diamondbacks and is currently trying to dump the Coyotes.
While we may be shifting to a more a la carte sports landscape, that doesn’t necessarily mean price savings for fans. Historically, the high cost of sports was spread out in larger channel bundles, so every TV viewer was subsidizing die-hard sports fans. You can see how this impacts price with a service like Sling TV, which offers lower prices by allowing viewers to choose a smaller subset of top cable channels, while sports fans can opt to pay more to see all of them.
It will be fascinating to see whether NBA fans flock to these standalone streamers, or whether the audience for such a product is just too small. But unless something changes, sports leagues will continue to demand a premium for their games, and that price will ultimately fall to consumers one way or another.
Suns Live
Suns Live is a direct-to-consumer streaming service offering live Phoenix Suns NBA games
to Arizona residents. Suns Live will simulcast 70 regular season Suns games and all five preseason games during the 2023-24 season along with original content. The service is only available on web browsers.