Posts
As we approach the end of the second year of the historic 12-year, 5.2 billion dollar deal between the NHL and Rogers/Quebecor for TV rights in Canada, one has to look back at how Rogers is stacking up compared to
the good old days of hockey before “The Deal”. Long story short: unlike their
fancy new set, it ain’t pretty.
First of all, "The Deal" didn’t start off well: many Canadians
felt concern that hockey would move away from what has traditionally been
successful: Saturday night and playoff games available on CBC (available to
all) and move towards Rogers-based pay channels (available to some).
Public opinion polls like the one below had about 50% of Canadians not supporting
the new NHL-Rogers deal.
For Rogers, year one of “The Deal” ended with lower ratings than expected. Instead of increasing by 20% as projected, ratings stagnated, and
then dwindled. Ad rates were
dropped this year after Rogers failed to hit its audience targets last season,
but there was hope of a bounceback. Yet as this month closes out and with no
Canadian teams in the playoff picture, it’s hard to stay optimistic if you’re
expecting a sophomore windfall of good news at the Rogers camp.
So what’s
that you say? NHL hockey ratings are down?
In
Canada?? It almost sounds unheard of…. Impossible! Yet it’s true. So besides
the prospect of no Canadian teams in the playoffs for the first time in 40
years, how and what did Rogers do to screw up a Canadian golden goose of TV
success so royally? Let’s take a look below at some key mishaps:
Dude, where’s my
team?
The most maligned aspect of Rogers’ bungling treatment of
Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday is the so-called flex-scheduling. Flex scheduling has caused some bizarre scenarios
these past two seasons including hockey games being shown on non-sports channel
FX, Citytv and CBC simulcasting the exact same game and prominent Canadian
teams being used as bait on the subscription-only SportsNet family instead of
CBC or Citytv, where most hockey fans expect to find a Saturday night game. What’s worse of all is fans have no idea on what channel their
team is playing until they’ve scoured through the program guide and it usually
involves subscribing to multiple Rogers pay channels to ensure you will
see all games of your favorite team (hello Winnipeg Jets and Ottawa Senators fans). If getting more
Rogers channels into the TV packages of Canadians was the plan, it’s backfiring
miserably and at the expense of the NHL. 
When growing up, everyone would tune into CBC on Saturday
night to watch their local team. It was automatic. The day after or on Monday morning at school/work, no matter who you talked to,
they had seen the game and would discuss every highlight, lowlight and
controversial call with you. That has changed drastically in the past two
years. Looking at my own children this season and last, they simply have tuned out
the Saturday night holy tradition of having HNIC on CBC tuned in on the TV. We don’t
have all the necessary SportsNet channels in our household and have no plan on
getting them. Instead, my children are learning to follow hockey live (on
social media) rather than watch it on TV. They watch almost-live videos posted via
their team’s websites and fanbase social media accounts of key plays. There are dozens of
in-game commentaries being uploaded in discussion forums accessible from their
smartphones. And for live-play-by-play, they’re happy having the radio on the
background while they play Xbox. Rogers isn’t just ruining watching hockey for
me and my old fogies, they’re changing it for an entire new generation of
Canadians growing up.
Rogers needs to realize that Canadian don’t simply like watching NHL hockey; they like watching their local NHL teams. So the first thing to do is ensure each local CBC TV affiliate shows their local team via a simulcast of the game's SportsNet feed. Canadians expect to tune into their local CBC station on Saturday night and see their local hockey team hitting the ice. People in Montreal have no interest in seeing the Leafs take on the Blue Jackets. Ottawa and Winnipeg have had hardly any exposure on the national networks this year. Asking fans to scour for their team on B-rate channels like SN360 is ridiculous for a Saturday night game. Simulcast the local teams on their respective CBC affiliate and people will tune in.
As for Citytv and their 7PM Saturday night game, there’s no
clear answer on this one. Citytv could drop the game altogether and bring back
the Sunday night game (see Hometown
Hockey below), or they could show a national interest game that does not
involve Canadian teams but would still be worthy to watch (think Stamkos,
Crosby, Toews). At least this way if there is a blowout on CBC or if the local
game isn’t interesting, the causal hockey fan has a channel to flip to.
The Sunday Night
Hockey Game
Hometown Hockey
debuted on Citytv in the first season of the Rogers deal. A nationally
televised Sunday night hockey game came as a pleasant surprise to many
Canadians, especially given the community feel given to the night as the Rogers
mobile broadcast studio visited communities from coast to coast, marked with
festivities and much fanfare. Rogers finally got something right and many felt
a new family and community-oriented Canadian hockey tradition was starting. Don't get me wrong; I liked it and watched it with my family - when it was on Citytv.
So for season two, what did Rogers do? Sunday night's Hometown
Hockey was moved from Citytv to Sportsnet in hopes of boosting
ratings and subscribers to the pay channel. Instead, the opposite occurred with
a 30 percent drop in viewers from its inaugural year. Rumour is now the very concept of
a Hometown Hockey game on Sunday nights is in jeopardy.
How to fix it:
Easy solution is to move the game back to Citytv where the formula worked before, or even
CBC for that matter. If Rogers is serious about building a new hockey
tradition, you don’t put something like that on a pay-only channel. The viewers
have spoken, will Rogers listen?
Marquee Games like The Winter Classic
The Bridgestone Winter Classic this year was a marquee event
for the NHL in Canada and for NHL Canadian sports coverage: it had a coveted
timeslot at 1PM on New Year’s Day, when everybody is either together
with family or nursing a hangover in front of the TV after lunch. On top of
that, a perfect original six matchup for hockey fans north of the border: the
Boston Bruins took on their dreaded rivals the Montreal Canadiens, teams with
enormous history and a rabid fan base to match. The last time a Winter Classic US/Canada original six confrontation happened in 2014 with
Toronto taking on Detroit, CBC set records with almost 4 million viewers, the
highest ever for a non-playoff game. An easy ratings homerun for Rogers, right?
Wrong.
So what exactly did Rogers do to bungle what should have been an
easy Canadian ratings slam-dunk? Well,
instead of broadcasting the outdoor game on CBC as done in the past (and as per
Hockey Night in Canada tradition dating back to the first Heritage Classic
outdoor game in Edmonton), for the first time ever it parked the game on
Sportsnet. Problem is, not everybody has Sportsnet in their TV package and no
one in their right mind would subscribe to watch for just one marquee game,
meaning casual holiday-season TV sports viewers in Canada couldn’t just flip
channels and tune in. On top of that, someone at Rogers head office failed to
realize (or chose to ignore) that NBC in the US was broadcasting the game,
meaning people with even the most basic of cable package (or people with
an over-the-air antenna within range of the US border like Toronto, Vancouver
and Montreal) could watch the game anyways. The results were disastrous.
Sportsnet did not yet disclose its ratings for the 2016
Winter Classic but the silence and lack of this type of disclosure says a lot (had it been
a large number it would have been plastered over every Rogers press release).
Pundits are saying it was nowhere close to the record set in 2014 aired on CBC,
perhaps as much as 40% lower than the 2014 figures, indicative by the numbers
south of border for NBC which weren’t very encouraging to say the least. (Remember, ratings for Canadian viewers do not count in NBC totals).
How to fix it:
Rogers, what were you thinking??? This one was so easy we're even surprised you blew it. Marquee games belong on
CBC where all of Canada can watch. The good news is by doing this, you get an
invaluable chance to show off to casual and potential new hockey fans what
makes you great for watching NHL hockey. Also, while people are tuned in on
CBC, you get to plug any other Rogers programming or products, get in-game
viewers to check out your website and social media accounts and then drive
post-game viewers to your other networks. Duh!!!
French Language
Coverage
While Rogers’ SportsNet covers English-language NHL
programming, partner Quebecor’s TVA network took the reigns over from Bellmedia
rival RDS … sort of. While Quebecor put all its eggs in the basket of making
TVASports the official NHL francophone broadcaster, it made its first mistake
by losing regional broadcast rights back to RDS in its primary market of Quebec
for the only two teams with a considerable francophone backing, being the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators. This meant
the network would only air maximum one game per week of these teams, and would
have to wait until the playoffs (if any) to gain a ratings monopoly. Oops.
At the launch of "The Deal", Francophone audience
expectations were set sky high when it was shown that there would be hockey games
on Francophone network TVA as well (see graphic below). However, with regional
rights lost, the big-ticket Saturday game was forced to pay-only TVASports to drive
subscribers to the sagging sports network, and two years later not a single NHL
game has been shown on the TVA network. What was worse for fans was that although the Saturday night Francophone games were available nationally, fans outside of the region trying to watch the weekday games lost
out as the games were blacked out on the rival network (rights were only regional).
As the final part of this bungling hat-trick of TVASports’ new
reign as an NHL broadcaster, it assembled a team of B-list TV personalities
from the incumbent RDS network and brought in less-known former hockey players
as colour commentators. It then tried to pass this lacklustre and inexperienced
team off as a high end sports commentary crew, and then brought rival TV service
providers such as Bell to arbitration (such as below in May 2015) to raise retransmission fees
or face having the network pulled from their subscribers.
How to fix it:
A TVA simulcast on Saturday nights (as originally proposed) may
have been the missed opportunity here for TVASports. By putting Saturday night
hockey games back on network TV, Quebecor would have probably been hailed as heroes
by the general francophone public, returning Saturday night hockey to the people after years
of a cable-only RDS monopoly. True, due to the bad negotiating for regional
nights of weekday games, the Saturday night TVA showcase would have severely dented
any ratings TVAsports would have had, but those ratings were up for debate
anyways as many Francophones have shown that rather than sign up for TVAsports they have resorted to watch the game
in English while muted with Francophone radio commentary.
The missed opportunity lies in what could have been: the exposure the network would have had. A captive audience for DVR-proof programing on a nationally broadcast TV network for three hours is a priceless self-promotion prospect that could have driven traffic to Quebecor websites, social media, discussion forums, and showcased other TVAsports programming to an audience of potential customers. Also, by being available freely, people would have been more forgiving to any growing pains as they would not be directly paying for the product. With Quebecor eventually looking to bring another NHL team to francophone Quebec City, one Saturday night regular season game on TVA would have been laying the foundation for a whole new generation of Francophones nationwide to become accustomed to the TVAsports product.
Will NHL hockey ever be shown on TVA? Je ne retiendrais pas mon souffle.
Conclusion
Rogers (and to a certain extent Quebecor) has assumed and taken for granted that the NHL is a cash cow in Canada. They overpaid for hockey in a badly-advised long-term deal, and now will hold hockey ransom and expect Canadians to pay for it through their cable bill. But will they really learn through these first two years that people aren’t fools; and can they make the changes to return NHL hockey to all Canadians?
Besides fixing “The Deal”, there is one final area of concern and that is the future popularity of hockey in this country. As a new generation grows up learning to “follow” hockey rather than watch it due to the bungling of Rogers, the questions must be asked: how long will the NHL let this go on? Ratings are down in Canada for two years straight. Will the decline and drought last another year? Two years? Five years? How much longer before a growing number of Canadians switch from being rabid fans that watch every game from pre-season onwards to casual viewers that only watch the playoffs and a handful of regular season games? How long can TV ratings slump until this starts affecting NHL merchandising and ticket sales?
Now remember this final point: whoever tells you the
business case for hockey on CBC (or any other national network) doesn’t work anymore in today’s economy is a
pure fool. The NHL is to Canada what the NFL is to the United States. It’s
interesting to see the success and profitability of the NFL isn’t related to cable-only
TV access.
-An editorial from Your Average Joe
