There are few institutions in this country that trigger as much dependable outrage as hockey and the CBC. Even so, when The Globe and Mail reported a couple of weeks ago that the public broadcaster wouldn’t be airing Games 5 and 6 of the Western Conference final between the Edmonton Oilers and Dallas Stars, the howls that arose from coast to coast were impressive in their breadth and volume.
You can understand the mockery: Instead of carrying what were expected to be some of the highest-rated games of the season, CBC chose to air the Canadian Screen Awards gala and an old Just For Laughs special during Game 5, and the season finale of its competition reality series Canada’s Ultimate Challenge instead of Game 6, on the night the Oilers clinched their Stanley Cup final berth. One newspaper columnist said CBC had “failed the nation.”
But what if, instead, there was actually a passive-aggressive method to its supposed madness?
CBC, of course, lost the rights to national NHL games – and the associated commercial ad revenue – when Rogers Sports & Media famously plunked down $5.2-billion for 12 years’ worth of hockey in late 2013. It handed over control to Rogers of its English-language network for more than eight months a year, every Saturday night during the NHL season and every night during the playoffs, without compensation. At the time the deal was struck, CBC management said they were pleased they would still be able to offer hockey to Canadians, continuing a tradition that was more than 60 years old. But inside the Corp, it was devastating.
That deal is up in two years, and more players are now signalling their interest in bidding on the next round of rights. In April, Amazon’s Prime streaming service in Canada joined the action when it snapped up the rights to Monday night games from Rogers. Since then, Prime has unveiled a series of NHL-related programming, including this week’s announcement of a new live weekly Thursday night whip-around studio show, starting next season, which will check in on every NHL game in progress.
When it lost the NHL rights, CBC declared that it was out of the business of pro sports. And with the cost of rights continuing to escalate, nobody expects it to be at the negotiating table for the next round of rights with any real money.
But by taking back control of its own network during those two key games this month – prompting ratings to fall by perhaps as much as one million – CBC seemed to be suggesting that it sure would be an awful shame if a large part of the NHL’s Canadian viewership simply evaporated when the league chooses its next media partners.
It still has the power to achieve mass reach. Which, as it happens, is exactly what sports leagues are rediscovering is important if they want to keep growing their fan bases.
Reach is suddenly the industry’s new watchword. For the past 15 years, Bell Media had put all CFL games – including, to the understandable outrage of many Canadians, the Grey Cup – behind the paywall of its TSN service. But last week, the company said that, this season, it will air select weekly games – and the Grey Cup match – on its CTV broadcast network.
After viewership in the United States was down sharply for last year’s Stanley Cup final, in part because the games aired only on the pay-TV networks TNT and TruTV, the numbers are up this year, with all games airing on the ABC broadcast network as well as ESPN.
In a world awash with sports content – highlights are free, and at your fingertips 24/7, not to mention an endless scroll of athlete-produced video – leagues now understand they need to make the games themselves more accessible than they have been, if they want to grow their fan bases.
And women’s leagues have been blazing that trail.
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This week, the Northern Super League, the new Canadian women’s soccer league, said it had struck a deal with TSN and CBC/Radio-Canada to broadcast and stream its games when it kicks off play in April, 2025. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but when I spoke last month with Diana Matheson, the league’s co-founder, she acknowledged that there were, as she put it “a lack of media rights in the Canadian market.” Which is to say, TSN and CBC are almost certainly not paying to carry the games.
The NSL is unproved, has no built-in fan base, no brand equity and very little awareness among the Canadian public. It has almost no leverage at the negotiating table. And it needs to build awareness more than it needs whatever small sums of cash it might have been able to extract for its rights. Without eyeballs on its TV product, the league won’t be a part of the mainstream conversation. Its founding sponsors won’t be able to justify their investments, the teams won’t be able to sell tickets, it will be harder to grow social media, its players won’t become stars, they won’t be able to secure their own sponsors, and nobody’s going to be buying jerseys.
So, the NSL will be paying to produce the broadcasts of its own games, following the model deployed by the PWHL in its inaugural season this year, which made its games available to TSN, Sportsnet and CBC, and also streamed its own broadcasts of every single game on YouTube. “This is the winning strategy in women’s sport,” Matheson said, explaining that she expected the broadcasting of games to be a “cost centre” rather than a “revenue centre” for the first three to five years.
“We grow the audience as big as possible and we monetize it the best way we can, and then in three to five years we’ll see what the Canadian media landscape is doing,” she said. “Because it’s obviously going to be changing fairly quickly.”