How Sportsnet, NHL and streamers change how we watch hockey

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In the very near future, how and where Canadians watch hockey could dramatically change.

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With just two seasons left in NHL’s landmark 12-year $5.23-billion broadcasting deal with Rogers, speculation already is ramping up about what it means for the league, especially for fans north of the border where the sport is king.

We examine the successes and failures of the current NHL broadcast landscape and investigate how consuming Canada’s game might soon look:

ARE THE STREAMING SERVICES COMING FOR THE NHL?

That Rogers and Amazon have developed a working relationship in the highly competitive National Hockey League rights arena speaks to that old saying about keeping friends close and enemies closer.

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For now, they are as close as Rogers wants or perhaps needs them to be. Beginning this season, the Canadian gatekeeper has sub-licensed a slate of national Monday night games to the Seattle-based corporate behemoth’s streaming division, Prime Video, for the final two years of its 12-year rights deal.

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Annual payments averaged $433 million through the life of that landmark agreement, but Rogers is on the hook for more than $500 million in each of the final two years.

Neither Amazon nor Rogers announced financial details of the pact, but it has been estimated by Danni Moore of Ampere Analysis that Amazon is paying $91.5 million per season to Rogers for its Monday foothold. Amazon will pair that live coverage with NHL Coast to Coast, a so-called whip-around production featuring game highlights and studio analysis on Thursdays.

Amazon has also provided analytics to the NHL through Amazon Web Services since 2021 and is clearly inching its way onto the ice. In preparation for what? More, certainly. How much more is unclear.

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ONE-DAY DELIVERY: WHAT’S AMAZON’S PLAN?

Amazon did not respond to an interview request from Postmedia for Jay Marine, head of Prime Video Sports. However, during an appearance on The Sports Media Podcast, Marine discussed the company’s various entries into the rights market, beginning with Thursday Night Football, a property that reportedly cost Amazon $11 billion over 11 seasons. So far, it represents the company’s only National Football League presence.

“We don’t have to fill hours or a linear schedule, so we can really be selective and we don’t need everything even in a given property,” Marine said.

He wasn’t speaking specifically about the NFL, NHL or any other sports league, but if that’s a glimpse at the company philosophy, sounds like there could well be room for Rogers to retain a healthy piece of the hockey package.

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Rogers will have the first seat at the table by way of an exclusive negotiating window, which apparently opens later this season, and Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri has already gone public with the company’s intent to bid again.

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Interview requests from Postmedia for both Staffieri and Rogers Sports & Media president Colette Watson were declined.

However, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has said repeatedly that he expects there will be rival bidders when the rights are up for sale once again.

“Rogers has been a great partner, but ultimately the marketplace will determine the value for our rights,” Bettman told The Hollywood Reporter. “For us in Canada, we’re the number one sport. We are the number one media property. So I anticipate a vibrant marketplace.”

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IS NHL TIRED OF LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP AND LOOKIN’ TO PLAY THE FIELD?

When the NHL parted ways with TSN and sold all of its national Canadian rights to Rogers Sportsnet a decade ago, it was the first time one of the major North American leagues had done so on a long-term basis. There is essentially no chance that happens again.

It has been reported that the NFL earns about $12.5 billion US annually from deals with CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN/ABC, Amazon, Netflix and YouTube.

The National Basketball Association’s 11-year, $76-billion rights package, which starts with the 2025-26 season, was parcelled out to ESPN/ABC, NBCUniversal and Amazon.

The Hollywood Reporter stated Major League Baseball signed with ESPN, FOX and TNT for a total of $12 billion through 2028, has a contract with Apple for a total of $595 million through 2029, and derives $10 million annually from Roku.

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“I think that the world of licensing a single party all of the rights, or all of the national rights as has been typical under the deal with Rogers, I think that time has passed,” said California-based media rights consultant Ed Desser, a 40-year veteran in the industry. “It would be my expectation that the NHL would have at least two packages going forward, and it could be more than that.

“There is no more important property on an ongoing basis in Canada than the NHL,” Desser said. “I would fully expect the league to arrange its dealings in a way to maximize its revenue and exposure and increasingly that includes a streaming platform because that’s where the subscribers are migrating.”

Cord-cutting is a societal and financial reality, and there is no stemming that tide. It has already created a seismic shift at most networks, as they move away from large entertainment expenditures, and invest more heavily in sports programming. That’s a survival tactic, according to Desser.

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“If networks choose to continually cut programming budget, migration will continue to streaming,” he said. “If they treat sports content as the Holy Grail, I would expect them to find any change they can in the couch and put it on the table. I also expect there to be shifting of spending, away from entertainment product, and therefore I think it’s likely that the proportion of spending going to sports amongst those networks will continue to grow. It has already almost doubled in proportion.”

WHAT KEEPS ROGERS EXECS UP AT NIGHT?

More and more people would be shocked if it wasn’t Amazon because they clearly have come to play.

“I believe we will be a major sports broadcaster in every major market around the globe,” Amazon’s Marine told the Washington Post. “In terms of what does that mean? How many properties? I don’t know.”

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That great unknown has been the nightmare scenario of late for Rogers’ Watson, who confessed her fears to the Ottawa Business Journal in March 2023.

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“I made a presentation to the NHL Board of Governors in December (2022) and Mr. Bettman asked me at the end of it: ‘What keeps you up at night?’ Amazon keeps me up at night because Amazon can come in and swoop these NHL rights up from under me in three years, because they have way more money than we do.”

There need not be any tag days for Rogers, a $29-billion public company. In mid-September, Rogers ponied up $4.3 billion to buy out Bell’s matching 37.5% stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.

Amazon, on the other hand, is valued at $2 trillion US and apparently is always ready to spend money to add value to a Prime membership, according to Marine. When he made an appearance at the launch of Monday Night Hockey in Toronto in mid-September, he said the company intends to spend big on hockey, which is music to the NHL’s ears.

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“Our goal is to make it a huge national event every Monday,” Marine said. “We are going to invest like crazy to do that. I know Gary has noticed what we’ve done around the world with big properties, whether that’s Thursday Night Football in the U.S. or Champions League in Europe.”

WHO WILL GARY B AND THE NHL BE TARGETING WITH NEW DEAL?

At the same event in Toronto, Bettman praised Amazon for promising to step up its game.

“The creativity, the investment that they’re going to make in production, I think people, particularly young people, are going to find really exciting,” Bettman said. “I think Amazon will bring the wow factor. We’re a big deal in Canada, the biggest, and they’re going to make us even bigger. They’re going to give our fans an opportunity to connect with the game in new ways. They’re going to maybe break some traditions, which is not a bad thing for Gen Zs and Gen As.

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“When we look back on this season, we’re going to say wow, we’ve taken everything to another level.”

It might not have been his intent, but Bettman couldn’t have fired a bigger shot across the bow at the good ship Rogers, which has had to navigate some choppy waters through the pandemic and too many years without a Canadian team on a deep playoff run.

Only the Habs in 2021 and Oilers in 2024 have gone the distance to the Stanley Cup final. That certainly eats away at revenue projections.

WHAT HAS ROGERS SPORTSNET DONE WITH NHL, IS IT GOOD ENOUGH?

Rogers has indeed been a good steward of the game, exposing it to more fans than ever before. Game 7 of the Oilers/Panthers Stanley Cup final reached 15 million Canadian viewers, an all-time high for Sportsnet.

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The network’s talent generally is top-notch, though they didn’t exactly start out on the right foot with every hire.

Pandering to a younger audience by installing George Stroumboulopoulos as a studio host was a misstep. It was, however, just a two-year experiment and they have since gone back to the likes of Ron MacLean, David Amber and Caroline Cameron.

Their corps of analysts and insiders, anchored by Elliotte Friedman, Jennifer Botterill, Kelly Hrudey and Kevin Bieksa, adds value to the broadcast.

That said, Rogers has churned through personnel and has been roundly criticized for cutting some big names, with reporter Christine Simpson the latest to go. Others include Jeff Marek, Dave Randorf, Paul Romanuk, Jim Hughson, John Shannon, Nick Kypreos and Don Cherry.

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When the deal was announced back in 2013, then-Rogers president Keith Pelley said: “It will be the NHL like never before.”

What Rogers delivered was more NHL than ever before.

“What changed is you basically have national content week in and week out and practically every night,” Desser said. “It used to be in the old days, you had Saturday night, maybe you had Wednesday. It wasn’t there all the time. The deal with Rogers changed the availability fundamentally.

“I don’t know that it changed production and presentation all that much. It just made the product available more readily and I think that is an indication of the strength of hockey.

“It used to be in the old days that you were mindful of over-exposing your product. You wanted each game to be special. You didn’t want to give people too much of a good thing and I think that is something that has changed. I don’t know if you can point to the Rogers deal as the cause of that, because we are seeing it in other sports as well in other places.

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“But clearly, as live sports is the thing that delivers significant audience, where entertainment content doesn’t to nearly the same extent, there is a greater willingness to program more and more hours, more and more nights, with live sports.”

HOW HUGE IS THE NHL GOING TO CASH IN?

For the NHL, the only one of the four major North American sports leagues not tied into a rights deal after 2025, that’s the perfect storm.

“I like my position as the NHL,” Desser said. “We just saw the NBA make deals that roughly tripled their rights revenues. It’s not exactly apples to apples, and obviously the NBA is more U.S.-centric, but the same trends are impacting both the U.S. market and Canadian market. It’s the migration, it’s the relative importance of live sports to linear networks.

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“It’s always been an important part of the programming line-up, but nowadays it is the primary reason that people tune into traditional networks. As a result, it is more important, relatively speaking, to those networks.

“And at the same time you’ve now got super deep-pocketed organizations, and we shouldn’t just talk about Amazon because Netflix has now entered the sport space with WWE and their NFL games at Christmas, so there could very well be additional parties. You have (Major League Soccer) with their deal on a worldwide basis with Apple.

“So it’s happening and nowadays I’d say a streaming partner or partners is not the exception anymore, it’s the rule. So I would be shocked if there wasn’t at least one streaming partner as part of the NHL’s next Canadian licence term.”

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