CBC News - In Canada, it’s never been more complicated — or expensive — to watch NHL hockey

[Fenway]

It’s never been more complicated, or expensive, to watch NHL hockey as the multiyear Rogers broadcast deal winds down. To watch every game of the 2024/2025 season fans will need to subscribe to Sportsnet, TSN, RDS, TVA and Amazon Prime.​

Click to read more...

 

[Nineteen67]

Doesn’t everyone subscribe to those anyway.

 

[Nuckles]

And the cherry on top is that Rogers is a disaster of a company that can't even get their paid streaming service to work properly.

In both Canucks games this season there were major problems. Game 1 had the ads running longer than they were supposed to, so every single ad break we'd miss 1-2 minutes of the game. Game 2 gave everyone an error for the entire 3rd period saying you can't watch outside of Canada.

Anyway this song slaps

 

[Nineteen67]

For elderly people its horrible to not know where or how to watch.

 

[joestevens29]

Headline is complete garbage. People forget that we actually couldn’t watch all the games on tv that long ago?

 

[TheBeastCoast]

It is far easier to just sail the seas these days. Think I am going to pay like 300 a year to legally watch games they won't let me watch on cable they are out of their minds lmao

 

[Fantomas]

Piracy is the way.

 

[Lazytrout]

It's never been easier on the high seas!

 

[tarheelhockey]

It’s mind blowing how sports broadcasting can be such a poorly developed industry considering how much easy money is tied up in it.

 

[frederixx]

Take a Sportsnet plus account, you can share it with a friend (each pay half) and take a VPN for 2$ month

 

[Mr Kot]

It is far easier to just sail the seas these days. Think I am going to pay like 300 a year to legally watch games they won't let me watch on cable they are out of their minds lmao

Piracy is the way.

It's never been easier on the high seas!

 

[Tie Domi Esquire]

Meh. Games have never been more missable.

 

[HockeyVirus]

My first year pirating. Willing to pay to see all games several hundred a year. No option, not subscribing to 5 things to see them all

 

[AlainVigneaultsGum]

Meh. Games have never been more missable.

 

[Backlund]

I'll take a 10-20 second delay over paying more money to watch the same amount of games I could before. This is the dumbest way to try and make streaming work.

 

[MoneyManny]

The worst is that even after subscribing to all of these, we still get the privilege to watch ads on helmets, jerseys, and gambling ads every 30 seconds.

They make it really easy to take the decision to sail the high seas.

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

Arrrrrrrrr!!!

 

[Took a pill in Sbisa]

It’s never been more complicated, or expensive, to watch NHL hockey as the multiyear Rogers broadcast deal winds down. To watch every game of the 2024/2025 season fans will need to subscribe to Sportsnet, TSN, RDS, TVA and Amazon Prime.​

No I don't? I pay $6.99 a month for ESPN+ and that has all the games. A friend of mine has NHL.tv and that also has all the games.

 

[Gaylord Q Tinkledink]

Doesn’t everyone subscribe to those anyway.

No.

RDS is French TSN. TVASports is f***ed, so it's French Sportsnet.

My buddy doesn't have prime, so he can't watch the game tomorrow.

 

[MSZ]

No I don't? I pay $6.99 a month for ESPN+ and that has all the games. A friend of mine has NHL.tv and that also has all the games.

There is no ESPN+ in Canada, unless you go for the VPN route.

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

So even with Centre Ice nowadays I still wouldn’t get all the Pens games??? I’m in Canada

I just was randomly wondering about that as I got rid of Centre Ice a few years back and I don’t even have cable anymore.

 

[JPeeper]

Blows my mind how many people were defending the Amazon deal saying, "lol well Rogers/Sportsnet sucks anyway". Doesn't matter, paywalling games behind additional services is f***ing stupid.

Missing Jays games because they were on AppleTV was ridiculous and now the NHL adopted this trash business model.

 

[Took a pill in Sbisa]

There is no ESPN+ in Canada, unless you go for the VPN route.

My bad, didn't see that part of the title.

VPN seems like the most simplistic route then for Canadians, no?

 

[MadLuke]

No I don't? I pay $6.99 a month for ESPN+ and that has all the games. A friend of mine has NHL.tv and that also has all the games.

WIth vpn to navigate local black out ?

Because they seem to be missing some (TNT for example, do they enforce some blackout ? Some just on ESPN and not espn+, etc...):

https://www.espn.com/nhl/team/schedule/_/name/nyr/new-york-rangers

https://www.espn.com/nhl/team/schedule/_/name/pit/

I am not sure how common wanting to watch all the games would be and in that regard maybe it is simpler-cheaper than in the past.

But say for someone that only cared about all Montreal Canadiens games, there were a window that having RDS gave you 82 regular season games + playoff, virtually never any lag or any issue, now that got significantly more complicated.