Another Hit to Broadcaster Relevance: CBC Loses the NHL

Sports is something of a last bastion for the relevance of traditional TV broadcasting. The NHL left the CBC, signalling another blow.

The relevance of TV broadcasting has long been a diminishing thing over the last several decades. There are many factors associated with this as well. This includes the excessive reliance of cheap rebroadcasting of American programming along with “Canadian” knockoff programming that made watching Canadian TV stations for entertainment purposes an extremely difficult chore.

With entertainment largely out of the picture, that left two aspects of broadcast TV worth watching: live news and sports. Live news has increasingly struggled to get an audience thanks to low quality coverage, biased coverage, anti-technology, and obviously partisan coverage, the news has increasingly felt like watching a video version of some amateur blog run by people who are just starting to learn the ropes of news coverage and stumbling pretty hard along the way. What’s more, the heavy emphasis on trying to appease technophobic boomers has pushed large portions of the “younger” (people in their 40’s aren’t really that young any more, sorry) away from watching TV altogether. This has left broadcast TV to continue to see their audience shrink as the boomer population dies off with little to nothing replacing it. The statistics have long confirmed that.

The combined lack of entertainment and irrelevant news has pushed huge swaths of the audience to the internet where they could easily get their entertainment on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and other platforms for free. Some even spend their hard earned money on premium streaming services like Netflix, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video among others. This has helped to usher an unstoppable wave of cord cutting which the big providers have admitted is definitely a thing.

So, what allows traditional broadcast TV to survive if so much of the audience has been pushed away to internet offerings? Well, two things: government subsidies and sports broadcasting.

For subsidies, the government, multiple times a year, issues massive media bailouts to make up the difference in budget shortfalls – shortfalls that can largely be tied to business decision blunders more than anything else. Arguably, the regular bailouts dolled out by government on the taxpayer dime has enabled traditional broadcasters to simply shrug their shoulders and refuse to change or adapt their business models and practices to keep up with the modern era. Thus ensuring the audience shrinkage continues.

For sports – especially live sports – this has remained to be one of the last reasons why large portions of the audience has even had TV subscriptions at all. The internet, after all, has long held the title for best source of news and entertainment (Freezenet is one great example of that) for many people now, but traditional sports – especially live sports – has been something that has eluded the internet thanks to tight deals broadcasters have with different sports leagues.

In recent years, however, that has gradually changed. Examples include the Amazon NBA deal, the YouTube NFL deal, the Apple MLS deal, and the Amazon NBA deal. For observers, these deals, at minimum, represents cracks to the last remaining dam preventing the cord cutting from fully taking hold. If you already have live sports with the premium services, why bother wasting money on expensive TV broadcasting packages?

While the deals are bad enough because it ends a certain amount of exclusivity for traditional broadcasting and sports, losing sports altogether is an even bigger blow. That’s exactly what happened recently when the CBC apparently lost the rights to broadcast NHL hockey – killing Hockey Night in Canada on CBC in the process. The CBC couldn’t really hide just how big of a deal this is as they fully admit that they lost hockey:

CBC will no longer broadcast NHL hockey games after it and national rights-holder Rogers Sportsnet were unable to come to agreement on a new sublicensing deal that would have allowed the public broadcaster to air games on its Saturday program Hockey Night in Canada.

The CBC, which began televising NHL games in 1952, had operated under that agreement since Rogers Sportsnet acquired the league’s Canadian rights in 2013 for $5.2 billion. Rogers Sportsnet renewed those rights with a 12-year, $11.2-billion deal to begin in October. The CBC previously aired national games on Saturdays, along with all four playoff rounds each year.

The CBC and Rogers Sportsnet announced the change in a joint statement Tuesday.

“After a successful 12-year partnership, Sportsnet and CBC today announced the public broadcaster will no longer carry NHL broadcasts after the current season as it moves forward with a new sports programming strategy following the unprecedented success of the Milano/Cortina Olympic Games,” the statement said.

“Watching hockey on Saturday night is a time-honoured tradition for Canadians, and Sportsnet is privileged to continue delivering that tradition. This has been a terrific partnership, and both parties look forward to continued opportunities to collaborate in the future.”

So, how do people watch live NHL games now? That is on the NHL website and it is definitely more online than ever before:

IN THE UNITED STATES
National Games

ESPN+ Broadcasts: Stream in ESPN+ and Hulu
TNT Broadcasts: Watch on TNT >> Stream in the Watch TNT and HBO Max apps
ESPN Broadcasts: Watch on ESPN >> Stream in the ESPN app
ABC Broadcasts: Watch on ABC >> Stream in the ESPN app

IN CANADA
National Games

Sportsnet Broadcasts: Watch on Sportsnet networks >> Stream on Sportsnet+ in the Sportsnet app
Prime Video Broadcasts: Stream in Amazon’s Prime Video App
TVA Sports Broadcasts: Watch on TVA >> Stream in the TVA app

Another thing is the fact that you can simply Google a live score for games for free. Further, the NHL also posts highlights of NHL playoff games shortly after the game is over. One example of this is the final playoff game:

Here’s the thing in all of this: it is increasingly difficult to justify why you would watch traditional sports like hockey on traditional cable TV networks. What was once the only way you could actually watch the game has increasingly been whittled down to mere seconds of delay (something I learned about through talking to sports fans over the years). This is something that is of relevance to people to place bets on the game. Otherwise, as a sports fan, how much are you going to notice something like that?

As more and more sporting events go increasingly online, traditional broadcasters are increasingly running out of reasons why people watch traditional broadcast TV in the first place. While it is unlikely that this is the straw that breaks the camels back on this front, it’s hard to deny that this does represent a pretty big blow – specifically to the CBC.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.