Rogers and CBC have announced that they will no longer air Hockey Night in Canada, meaning that free, public access to NHL hockey on Saturday nights is dead.
Hockey Night in Canada was an institution, a time-honoured pastime, and a Saturday night reprieve that brought much of the nation together to watch the mesmerizing mosaic on ice known as hockey.
Growing up there was hardly a Saturday night that wasn’t consumed by back-to-back hockey games surrounded by my friends in one of our parents’ basements, playing mini-sticks in the intermission whilst we listened to the analysts discuss the previous period and news on the league.
These memories are cherished by myself, and no doubt countless other Canadians since the broadcast first aired on CBC in 1952. Now, this weekly national tradition is under attack due to the sheer greed of the telecom oligopolist Rogers.
For some context, Hockey Night in Canada is a production owned by the CBC, which first aired on television in 1952. The CBC, a crown-corporation with a mandate to inform and entertain Canadians, made Saturday Night NHL hockey games publicly available for all Canadians.
The demise of free hockey began in 2014, when Rogers’ new exclusivity deal with the NHL kicked in. Luckily, for a 12 year window, the CBC had a sub-licensing deal which let Rogers produce and air Hockey Night in Canada but allowed the CBC to broadcast it as well.
This allowed Rogers and its shareholders to retain all ad revenue from Hockey Night in Canada whilst still allowing all Canadians to access the program for free. But now, that deal has ended, and hockey on Saturday night is now behind a paywall.
I know what many of you are probably thinking: “Who can’t afford a Sportsnet package?”, “Who doesn’t have the sports package with their cable provider?”, to which I would say, quite frankly a lot of people!
To make matters worse, a Sportsnet subscription does not even yield the ability to stream any NHL game you want, meaning there is technically no guarantee of watching a Canadian team on a given Saturday night.
With NHL games now being fragmented across multiple streaming services and affected by regional blackouts it would cost fans hundreds, if not over a thousand dollars a year to watch all the hockey they want.
This renders an already inaccessible sport in the playing-realm further economically inaccessible on the viewing-side. Hockey is being gate-kept from financially struggling Canadians, all so that the shareholders at Rogers can increase their net-worths.
If hockey is a part of what it means to be Canadian, and is so engrained in our culture, why is it increasingly locked behind economic barriers?
Youth participation is already decreasing due to economic factors, and now youth interest as a whole is at stake as well.
It is worth noting however, that the CBC still owns the ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ trademark. There is an opportunity that exists here. The NHL isn’t the only hockey league with teams in Canada.
CBC should keep the broadcast alive, and broadcast leagues like the CHL or the PWHL to continue the time-honoured tradition of publicly broadcasted Saturday night Canadian hockey.
The PWHL’s success in recent years has been phenomenal to watch, and giving Women’s hockey a greater platform to shine would only have positive effects on the growth of the game.