Grow Up NHL - Blackouts

[Tawnos]

said this in another thread just recently but the NHL will lose fans over this BS. Been watching the caps since the 80s. I dont watch anymore because Im not spending 15-20 mins trying to find where the game is and how much whatever dumb app costs. It was on the same channel for like 30 years. Now I have to have monumental or espn+ or some other BS app. The greed is ridiculous. As someone said above, Id pay for one subscription that has all of the caps games on it but Im not paying for multiple and then at game time i turn it on and its blacked out. Rather the league fold.

I have to say, every time I read posts like this, my mind is boggled. It takes very little time to find where a game is. Look at the NHL app or NHL.com. And you only really need to do that if the game isn't on Monumental. If it's a national TV game, that takes no more time than it did before. Instead of a national broadcast being in one of 2 places, now it's in one of 3. The horror!

The only thing that's really changed here is that you have an occasional game that you can only access via a streaming service (ESPN+/Hulu). Yeah, that's an adjustment and it is about driving up the revenue of the league (what you call greed). But it's not something that deserves the kind of vitriol you're throwing at it.

 

[Crow]

The NHL should either Nuke NHL Network or put it on ESPN+. The fact that network exists and dictates what games are and are not blacked out on weekends is a travesty.

The quality of an ESPN+ stream is so much lower than an illegal stream unfortunately.

 

[koyvoo]

Thank goodness for my IPTV

 

[The Hanging Jowl]

Yea I know, like I said the model is outdated. Idk what Canada is like for streaming rights I live in the USA, if a game is locally/national on cable it's blacked out in that area on espn+ who solely advertise the out of market aspect.

Even this I don't understand. Why? If I was one of ESPN's advertisers, I would want to know why they're artificially limiting the reach of my ads even though it wouldn't cost ESPN (or the NHL or whoever makes these decisions) a dime to just open it up to all markets.

I don't know if they ever do this anymore (someone above said above the NFL doesn't do this now) but the Buffalo Bills used to black out games if the stadium didn't sell a certain percentage of tickets. I don't agree with that either but at least there was a semblance of logic behind it (to get people out to the games). NHL blackouts make zero sense whatsoever. They simply irritate their fans for no reason whatsoever that I can think of. Do they want to sell this game or not?

 

[Bringer of Jollity]

Start moving toward the MLS route and have one partner, with one "all-in-one" fee that provides no-blackout access to every game, with simulcasts for big/regular national telecasts.

For a cord-cutter currently, the NHL model is awful. ESPN+ and some package subscription for TNT, another for the RSN for the local team, an add-on to get NHL Network, then a whole other package subscription for Fubo. Even if the latter two don't have all that many games, it's a pretty ridiculous investment to try to get everything compared to my $100 for MLS League Pass for the season.

 

[Tawnos]

Even this I don't understand. Why? If I was one of ESPN's advertisers, I would want to know why they're artificially limiting the reach of my ads even though it wouldn't cost ESPN (or the NHL or whoever makes these decisions) a dime to just open it up to all markets.

I don't know if they ever do this anymore (someone above said above the NFL doesn't do this now) but the Buffalo Bills used to black out games if the stadium didn't sell a certain percentage of tickets. I don't agree with that either but at least there was a semblance of logic behind it (to get people out to the games). NHL blackouts make zero sense whatsoever. They simply irritate their fans for no reason whatsoever that I can think of. Do they want to sell this game or not?

The league would lose an ENORMOUS amount of revenue if they removed the local blackout from ESPN+. Every single local TV contract would be worthless.

 

[Tawnos]

Start moving toward the MLS route and have one partner, with one "all-in-one" fee that provides no-blackout access to every game, with simulcasts for big/regular national telecasts.

For a cord-cutter currently, the NHL model is awful. ESPN+ and some package subscription for TNT, another for the RSN for the local team, an add-on to get NHL Network, then a whole other package subscription for Fubo. Even if the latter two don't have all that many games, it's a pretty ridiculous investment to try to get everything compared to my $100 for MLS League Pass for the season.

This isn’t likely to happen in a league where teams own their own broadcast networks.

The NHLN part of this is the biggest problem to me. They should offer a streaming sub for it in the NHL app.