The End of Hockey?

Bell Globemedia bidding $1.4B for TV hockey rights -- CHANNEL CANADA

I could have gone with a cheesy title like "NHL on Thin Ice?" But I'm above such puns.

I can't believe I missed this story when it first happened. Thats what happens when you spend most of your summer watching 90210 reruns and lusting after Shannen Doherty, rather than keeping an eye out for interesting sports media stories.

Anyway, this whole thing was brought to my attention by a friend of mine as we were discussing the Oilers' chances this season, and being media students, he mentioned this story. My interest piqued, I did some digging, and found the above article. You can also search the Globe and Mail's website, but any stories on the subject are now "archived" meaning you have to buy a $14.95 per month subscription to read them. Or go to your local library and find a hard copy there. Here's a link to one of the stories, if you really want to spend $14.95 a month.

The gist of the story is that Bell Globemedia, one of Canada's largest media conglomerates, is planning on offering $1.4B over 10 years for the rights to NHL broadcasts in Canada when the CBC's contract with the league is up in 2008. So basically $140M a year. That's more than double than the $65M per year the CBC is currently paying. Most insiders agree that if this happens, the CBC will be unable to post a competitive bid.

The problem with all this is that it will mean that most people who do not have cable or satellite service will no longer be able to watch hockey in Canada. While it is claimed that CTV will broadcast some games on their actual broadcast channels, such as CFTO, CKCO, or whatever the hell the call letters for their Calgary station are. (This raises an interesting question, when did stations stop using their call letters? And when did the CRTC stop requiring them to do so? Or have they?) But I digress.

The problem here is that CTV does not have the broadcast reach that the CBC does. While CKCO may claim to be the CTV station for Kitchener-Waterloo and London, as well as the rest of Southwestern Ontario, I have never been able to get a decent CKCO signal using just an antenna. And London, despite being a small town disguised as a city, is one of Canada's more populous cities. A quick glance at CTV's local stations page shows just how weak their coverage is. What about Windsor and Sarnia? For that matter, what about the good people of Detroit who watch CBC hockey coverage? What this shows is that people who want to watch hockey will be forced to abandon their antennas and purchase cable or satellite subscriptions. Which is, of course, good for Bell Globemedia, who are providers of Bell Expressvu satellite service. Media concentration at its finest.

Of course, there are other possible outcomes to this scenario. One is that this deal, should it happen, will be the death knell for the CBC. Long hindered by poor funding, out of control bureaucracy, and a mandate that can't possibly be met under current conditions, the CBC relies on hockey as a major source of revenue and publicity. Without the NHL, the CBC will likely find itself turned into a second rate PBS, with pledge drives hosted by Rick Mercer and Gordon Pinsent, showing reruns of British comedies. The Canadian government, both the current one, and the governments of the past, have not considered the CBC important, instead choosing to permit media concentration to persist, all the while abandoning any notion of giving the CBC the funding they need to provide Canadians with a proper public broadcaster. While some may argue that there is no longer a need for a public broadcast outlet, in this day and age of multiple channels, others argue that the fact that Canadian broadcasting is essentially run by Rogers, Bell Globemedia and CanWest Global (especially with the pending absorption of the essentially worthless CHUM Group into BGM), indicates that the need for a public broadcaster is even greater today than it was fifty years ago.

The end of Hockey Night in Canada on CBC will also mean the end of a Canadian institution. The memorable hockey moments provided to Canadians via HNIC are too numerous to count. The fact that Foster Hewitt, the voice of HNIC for so many years, has the award for hockey broadcasting excellence named for him, should give some indication of the importance of the CBC to hockey and to Canada. An argument could be made that hockey on CBC is so integral to Canadian culture that it should be protected at all costs. Arguments over the value of Canadian culture have been made before, as in the case of dual-run American magazines in Canada, that saw the Canadian government attempting to limit the incursion of American magazines into Canada.

One final potential outcome of all this is the death of hockey itself. Okay, maybe "death of hockey" is a bit hyperbolic, but possibly the death of the NHL. Still reeling from the public backlash over its multiple labour difficulties, the NHL cannot afford to alienate its most dedicated audience, Canadians. It is entirely possible that, with regular hockey broadcasts taken away from them, that some people will simply abandon the NHL altogether. While this likely won't happen with Leafs fans, most of whom have little else to cling to, it could happen to others, it could happen in other places. People could simply abandon NHL franchises, and turn to other alternatives for their hockey fix. Or curling, which plays at roughly the same level of excitement as hockey. And if that happens in Canada, the NHL is finished. They have overplayed their hand in the United States, to the point that the NHL receives zero dollars for its contract with NBC, and only slightly more for their contract with the American OLN. Hockey in the United States gets ratings that make the XFL look positively robust. So it is not the American market that is going to keep the NHL alive. Sure it might (and thats a very big might) be the future of the NHL to become a major American sport, but it should not be the NHL's primary concern in the short term.

And should Canadians choose to abandon the NHL, Bell Globemedia could find themselves with an albatross around their necks, weighing them down in much the same way that Major League Baseball does Fox. And by the time the BGM contract is up, the NHL could find themselves negotiating a Canadian contract from the same position of weakness that they negotiated their American contracts.

If the NHL leaves the comfort and familiarity of the CBC for the financially enticing siren song of Bell Globemedia, it could spell disaster for the CBC, the NHL, and hockey itself in Canada.