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August 18th, 2005
01:49 pm - NHL on OLN
So today I read the headline "Changing stations: NHL finds new broadcast home" on ESPN.com. "Good," I think, "maybe CBS or somebody picked them up." As it turns out, Comcast paid $200 million for the broadcast rights to the NHL, absolutely dwarfing ESPN/ABC's qualifying offer of $60 million. That's all well and good for the league, but where will the nation's largest cable provider air the games? OLN, as it turns out. You read right, the network formerly known as the Outdoor Life Network, the network whose two biggest claims to fame so far are "Survivor" re-runs and airing the Tour de France, will be the exclusive host of season games, the All-Star Game and most of the playoffs, until the last five games of the Stanley Cup, when NBC takes over (by the way, why only games 3-7? Why not games 1-2 as well? More importantly, why would Comcast want those two games and then have to hand off to someone else?).
This is awful. Sure the money is better up front, but what about advertisers? OLN has increased the number of households it's in by 75 percent in four years, but it's still in 26 million fewer households than ESPN2. Unless it continues to really grow, OLN may have a tough time convincing major advertisers to put their dollars into NHL broadcasts. And I don't have Comcast cable (right now) so I'd be blacked out except for Sportscenter recaps. That is, until the last five games of the Stanley Cup finals.
I understand that the NHL is looking for a committed partner, and OLN will instantly make the NHL the centerpiece of the channel, airing games on Monday and Tuesday nights. I also understand that the NHL had been underused by its network partners in the past (although I think Fox did the best in terms of trying to expand the audience with talk-about-it broadcast innovations like the FoxTrax puck), so they were looking for a place where viewers would be made aware of the league's presence. But it sucks for me and I'm afraid it's going to suck for the league as well. If it works and OLN expands its market share and the NHL makes money and is able to do some decent marketing and bring some fans back, then I'll be glad. But if, as I expect, the league squanders every chance it gets to make itself known on the continental stage, then the game will continue to struggle. Hockey is a game I think a lot of people would really enjoy, but if nobody gets to see it or knows why they should be watching it, then nobody's going to take that extra step to become a fan. Most people I know who've seen a game live become fans for life, but if tickets are still $40, not many people are going to become fans anytime soon. And if the TV games are hidden away on some obscure corner of cable broadcasting for very long, soon nobody's going to give the game a chance.
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Comments:
I'm a little leary of this move as well. Granted, the league probably needs the money, and it'd be damned nice if they hyped the game and continued to whittle away at some of the rules that make goalies the only necessary player on the ice.
I'm a big fan of King Kaufman, Salon.com's sports writer, and he believes (and I agree) that for one year, as a "sorry we fucked this up," all NHL teams should halve their ticket prices for every game, whether they could sell out or not, just to apologize to the fans.
Quite honestly, I'm not so sure this is a bad move for the NHL, it could very well be a bad move for OLN. What if the fans don't come back? Did we hear an uproarious clamor when we had no hockey? Not really. And I think that we all know that Disney's ESPN could have easily outbid Comcast's OLN if they wanted to, but the Econ Wizards of Epcot have probably figured out that the $200 million sum is far below the break-even point if the ad revenue doesn't come pouring in like it needs to for OLN to succeed.
In short, I'm pretty sure someone here is going to get screwed, but I'm not so sure it will be the NHL...
Well here's the thing: Comcast nearly bought Disney last year. So they've got the pockets to match ABC/Disney/ESPN. ESPN did, however, come to the conclusion that you surmised they did: That matching Comcast's offer wouldn't have made sense from a ratings/ad revenues stance. I think in Comcast's eyes, since the league will be the focal point of OLN's rebirth, it can afford to sink more money into it since it will bring new viewers to the channel. I know I'm going to bother people at work to change the channel to 38 or whatever it is here on Tuesday nights. ESPN won't get any "new" audience from the NHL and, evidently, it won't lose any for dropping it.
And you are right about there not being much clamor south of the Canadian border for hockey when it was gone. Basically every sports columnist/commentator of any repute has forsaken the game and shows like "Stump the Schwam" and "Bowling Night" basically matched regular-season NHL games for ratings this last year on ESPN. In Canada they've got NATIONAL HOCKEY NIGHT so they don't have to worry about this crap. |
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