Hey. I don’t always post this sort of thing, but I earned a communications degree while working for SCoC in my early years, and I thought I should say a few words on a hot topic that is recently came to the fore: the NHL. TV ratings.
Wait, please come back, I promise it’s interesting-
The problem, as presented:
The Sports Business Journal recently published an article showing that NHL Television’s ratings fell precipitously, by as much as 22% in the second year. of its shared contract with Turner Network Television and ESPN, which shared national coverage of the games thanks to a very long agreement. This exploded on the Internet box when Mark Burns of a data analytics company I’ve never heard of I decided to do the wrong thing and post on Twitter dot com about it.
Naturally, the easiest knee-jerk reaction is to blame Gary Bettman, and that’s probably a good decision because Bettman East the commissioner and just about everything has to go through him at some point and he’s a lot of the blame for why this mess got to this point, but almost everyone has had an opinion on this over the last few 48 hours, and we think it’s time we looked at some questions. At least I personally noticed that this might help.
Drunk
Last year, both ESPN and TNT posted respectable numbers in their NHL broadcasts without major interruptions throughout the year. One thing that definitely helped this front was the lack coverage failures; you could switch between local and national feeds without issue and it paid dividends, especially in larger markets. That wasn’t true this year, and it seems clear that regional blackouts have crippled the NHL’s reach.
Cable television is currently entering the twilight of its existence; very few channels make money, and even fewer achieve blockbuster audiences any of them prepackaged programming, and it’s considered a miracle if anything draws better than live sports (which is why Yellowstone is so beloved right now; it do.). Streaming is striving to become the new “default” option for visual art and live events, and it’s…well…it’s doing just that right now. Far too many services for increasingly exorbitant fees with increasingly draconian methods of keeping passwords and accounts in one place.
The NHL’s deal with ESPN should This might counteract that due to the weight and power of the mouse’s big wallet, but these contracts are still hurdles that don’t need to be there and make the prospect of watching an NHL game more difficult.
For example, let’s leave our market for a moment and talk about two Eastern Conference teams that are hot right now in the online space: the Devils and the Sabres. With the current methods available to us, there is currently no real way to watch the Devils or Sabers legally. due to their connection to MSG and the region’s largest cable company, Xfinity, refusing to carry MSG. Tage Thompson and Jack Hughes are indeed unavailable for their own markets thanks to this. Not to mention the many, a lot Sinclair stations in under the name of Bally on the verge of extinction and with which the league must now deal.
This, more than anything else, is marred by the fact that we remain stuck in this archaic concept of RSN.
Scheduled execution (wasted)
One thing The Athletic’s Sean Gentille brought up is that the precipitous drop could actually be linked to an absolutely absurd decision by ESPN to use hockey as programming against Sunday Night Football.
Which one is…not I’m going to work in the USA.
Even if you are not a football fan, you must be a real football fan with confidence. silly no one to think that Americans would want to watch hockey rather than their local football team. Sure, there have been more games on ESPN in recent months than last year, but even then it was the biggest TV draw around. It’s not smart, but in the coming months it should subside, as expected.
Of course, this doesn’t correct a perceived flaw in the calendar itself; a lot of people don’t like that division games seem so poorly placed, or are scheduled at weird times, or are filled with back-to-back games, or a whole myriad of different issues with the schedule that ultimately boil down to “I don’t do not like”. I don’t feel like the rivalries I had when I was 15 matter as much as they did now that I’m 30.” It’s a perfectly understandable argument.
But I also think there’s room for new rivalries, and if that was the goal set by the league… Bruins fans really don’t have much room to complain, because now they have two Blue and White teams that they hate more than anything. I have more complicated and vicious feelings towards the Lightning right now than I do towards the Habs, for whom my opinion has largely been “god, I hope they stay like that forever”, but that won’t be the case. only petty and mean parts of me.
The rest of me knows that Boston and Montreal are better for the league when they are good at the same time and play each other evenly throughout the season, not four games in the second half of the year.
“For what should we market the stars?
You’d think that would be an invitation to respond, right? The best players need to get adequate coverage to properly market the game by being the most skillful, the most impressive, and the best to watch. And we don’t care about US-specific examples!
Jack Hughes has finally come into his own, Trevor Zegras is doing both all kinds of crazy moves and also all kinds of asshole behavior that could make him a natural heel, Matty Beniers is aiming for a Calder and has some kind of goofy relationship. with Will Borgen. Jason Robertson has a direct lineage of Western Conference inspiration whose brother will hopefully soon be an NHL forward! We’re not looking to find examples of players you could use just to meet the needs of the Yankees!
But it’s a legitimate thought for mainstream hockey media. For some reason we have a really hard time letting people on TV who to want to talk about hockey’s stars, and are instead much more interested in honoring depth players as if they were the “real” heroes of hockey, rather than important parts of a larger whole. It’s good for them to spend time in the sun, but… ultimately, you burn in the sun if you stay out too long. This is where I think a lot of people struggle; balance cannot be achieved if you try to build one without the other.
I’m still treating the symptoms
In fact, one thing Gentille made clear at the end of his article is that these are all symptoms of much larger problems. The staggered starts, the Cape Crunch, those disastrous billboard ads, that “star argument,” the deeply uncomfortable prevarications the league makes on social issues, the inherently tribalistic nature of hockey fandom NHL that makes it Really It’s hard to consume the game the same way you consume the NBA or NHL, but I think the more critical issue is that of to access This is what has been nipping at the heels of the league and the sport as a whole for some time now. The league has clung to an outdated and frankly untenable model because its content makes it far too difficult to tune in and far too easy to find something else to watch.
We can have all the philosophical debates about the evolving nature of many aspects of gaming: its role in the wider community, the cost of entry, the cost of playing, of fighting, of increasing or decreasing score, of salary cap and the draft and the growth of the game and all that at some point, and I think we’ll have to do that very soon.
But first, let’s all agree that we all need to be able to watch these damn matches First of all; before anything else happens.
We can get into the details of what this sport should be like when we all get a chance to see it.
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