Scott Stinson: ‘What channel is the hockey on?’ The NHL is back, and watching it is more expensive than ever

The National Hockey League begins its regular season Tuesday night, which means we are just moments away from confusion across the land as fans try to find the games on their televisions.

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Traditional broadcast homes have been abandoned. New paid tiers have been introduced that will require fans in some provinces to subscribe to four services should they want to watch every game at home. And some of those services are streaming-only, meaning viewers used to finding the game on their traditional channel guide will be on a road to nowhere.

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A sampling of this week’s schedule: Wednesday night’s game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Islanders at Scotiabank Arena, which for the past dozen seasons would have been available as part of Sportsnet’s national broadcast schedule, will now only be on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service.

Saturday night’s game between the Leafs and Ottawa Senators, which would have been seen in most of the country on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, a staple since pretty much the invention of the television, will instead only be on Sportsnet. (The CBC will instead be showing Men’s Canada Super 60 Cricket League, which a majority of readers will have never heard of until reading this very sentence.)

And next Monday, when both the Senators and Winnipeg Jets have games that were for a decade part of Sportsnet’s national package, they will instead only be available on Sportsnet+, a streaming service that will require an extra subscription.

Fans of four of Canada’s seven teams — Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg — will have to subscribe to four different services, either through their TV provider or with separate digital subscriptions, just to be able to watch their full schedules: Sportsnet, Sportsnet+, TSN and Prime Video. (Fans of Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, whose regional broadcast rights are held by Sportsnet, will not require TSN, although any hockey fan who also wants to watch CFL or NFL football will need to subscribe to it, too.)

It will, as you might expect, cost a lot. It’s impossible to put a specific figure on the total because prices will vary depending on provider, region, and whether the subscriptions are standalone or bundled, but it could easily cost upward of $500 over the hockey season to ensure full access to one of those eastern NHL teams.

And while Canadian fans might want to place the blame for the situation on Gary Bettman, for the NHL commissioner is a natural villain in this country, the story is a bit more complicated than that — although Bettman does play a key role.

It begins in 2012, when Rogers Communications shocked the hockey world by scooping up the NHL’s national broadcast rights in Canada for $5 billion over a dozen years. After Rogers had effectively cut TSN and the CBC out of the picture, Bettman told the CBC to talk to Rogers about a way to keep hockey on the public broadcaster. That led to a frankly bizarre arrangement where Hockey Night in Canada remained on the CBC, but as Rogers-owned programming, with the private media conglomerate having full control.

As the Rogers-NHL deal neared expiry, it was expected that the league would seek multiple broadcast partners, reflecting a trend in the industry where smaller chunks of live-sports rights are sold off to American streamers like Netflix, Apple TV and Prime Video, which increases the overall broadcast revenue.

Instead, the NHL re-upped with Rogers again, announcing last spring that the Sportsnet owner would retain national rights in Canada for another dozen years, at more than double the cost of the last deal: $11 billion.

The steep price wasn’t a surprise — live-sports rights have continued to rise in cost as it has become one of the only television programs that can capture a large audience at a given time — but the fact that Rogers had the whole thing was unexpected. Wouldn’t the NHL have made more by parcelling bits of the Canadian schedule off to wealthy bidders? The other curiosity when the deal was announced was where it would leave the CBC. Was Rogers really going to let the public broadcaster borrow its programming after it had paid such an eye-watering sum for it?

Bettman, at least publicly, seemed to think so. He told a press conference announcing the second Rogers deal that he was “sure our friends at Rogers will make the right decisions and have the right discussions with the people at the CBC.”

Those discussions were evidently not fruitful, as Rogers announced in June that the CBC was out. CBC owns the Hockey Night in Canada brand, and on Monday announced it will air eight prime-time Professional Women’s Hockey League games in that slot.  Meanwhile, the NHL will be over on Sportsnet, and its new Saturday Night Hockey lineup.

And in recent weeks, the answer to why Rogers decided to pay all that money for the NHL has become more clear, as it announced ways to offset some of the costs. Its Wednesday slate of games was sub-licensed to Amazon for an undisclosed fee. (Amazon had done the same thing for the last two years of the first Rogers deal, but for the less appealing Monday slate of games, which among other things has to compete against NFL football for three months.)

After selling the Wednesday games to Amazon, Rogers sold the Monday games to itself, or more accurately directly to the consumer with its Sportsnet+ package. Customers who already get their television through Rogers must upgrade their Sportsnet subscription to Sportsnet+ for $12.99 monthly. Non-Rogers customers may at some point be able to upgrade their bundles in a similar fashion through a provider like Bell or Telus, but in the short term at least the only option is a standalone Sportsnet+ subscription, which starts at a steep $34.99 monthly. (Sportsnet says it is working with other distributors to make Sportsnet+ available to their subscribers, but negotiations over such fees among competitors rarely go smoothly.)

One can see how the math is not working in the hockey fan’s favour here. Online outrage about the new reality has been noticeable. Most sports watchers are used to subscribing to Sportsnet and TSN in this country, as they have long each held popular properties. But two additional paid services for hockey are a significant burden, and those are only even an option in homes that are set up to use streaming services on their televisions. (It is worth noting here that as the season unfolds, there will probably be a lot more households having discussions about illegal cable boxes.)

Asked about the pushback from fans, a statement from Sportsnet said, “Sportsnet+ is the ultimate destination for hockey fans. Sportsnet is focused on delivering more NHL content, including more national games with fewer blackouts, to more Canadians across multiple platforms.”

There was probably plenty of back-patting in the NHL offices when the new deal with Rogers was struck last year, considering the fat price tag attached. But the new television landscape in this country is what Bettman has wrought. And hockey fans will either have to bear steep new costs to watch games, or spend less time caring about the NHL.

Hope the new TV deal was worth it, Gary.

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