FanDuel Sports Network Southwest

On January 3, 1983, Houston sportscaster Bill Worrell signed a new cable channel on the air with a pregame show before a Houston Rockets home game. The channel was Home Sports Entertainment, which a University of Houston biography of Worrell calls Texas's first sports cable channel. Worrell was one of its original employees. He went on to call Rockets games on television for 39 years and to work as an analyst on Astros telecasts from 1985 to 2004.

The network changed owners and names many times over the next four decades. By 2019 it was Fox Sports Southwest, one of 21 Fox regional sports networks that Disney sold that May to Sinclair Broadcast Group for $10.6 billion, through a new venture called Diamond. Those channels had brought in $3.8 billion the previous year from 74 million subscribers. In 2021 the Texas channel took the name Bally Sports Southwest. By 2024, Diamond owned 90 percent of it and the Texas Rangers owned the rest.

The business built on cable bundles weakened as viewers cut the cord. Deadline described the model as a profit machine for decades that came under intense pressure in the streaming era. Diamond filed for Chapter 11 in March 2023 in a Texas bankruptcy court, seeking to eliminate $8 billion in debt. The case went badly for the Texas teams. In July 2024, Diamond asked the Houston bankruptcy court to end its contract with the Dallas Stars, telling the court that the rights fees outweighed the revenue the games brought in. That fall, Major League Baseball announced that the Rangers would leave the network for 2025. In October 2024, the networks took the FanDuel Sports Network name under a sponsorship deal.

Main Street Sports Group, which took over the networks out of Diamond's bankruptcy, kept having financial trouble. Teams in other markets canceled their deals in January 2026, and layoffs followed. In April 2026 the company said it was 'preparing to wind down our operations upon seasons' end unless we reach a strategic transaction.' The Fubo streaming service's help center says the FanDuel Sports Networks, including Southwest, were removed from its service at 11:59 p.m. ET on June 30, 2026. The San Antonio Spurs were still listed as the Southwest channel's team.