LILLEY: Don't cry for CBC as they drop 'Hockey Night in Canada'
· Toronto Sun
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If you were to listen to Liberal MPs, and to CBC, Canadians just won’t be able to watch hockey come the new NHL season. In reality, hockey is just returning to being broadcast solely on the private sector stations that initially aired the games before CBC stole it all.
As of this fall, if you want to watch most NHL games in Canada, you will need to subscribe to cable or directly to Sportsnet, owned by Rogers.
When Rogers initially won the NHL contract for the 2014-15 season, they needed the reach of CBC to hit the full Canadian market. Back then, Rogers paid $5.2 billion to broadcast NHL games over 12 years. Just recently they paid $11.2 billion for the NHL broadcast rights for another dozen years.
Rogers doesn’t need CBC anymore
Unlike in 2014, Rogers no longer needs the CBC to get the game in front of as many people as possible. The share of viewership for NHL games on CBC has fallen by 70% since 2014.
When Rogers won the rights more than a decade ago, most viewers, roughly 1.3 million each Saturday night, watched the game via CBC. This past season, that number dropped to below 400,000 viewers while Sportsnet took in 1.3 million eyeballs.
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Wednesday on Parliament Hill, CBC reporters headed to the meetings of the various political parties to ask MPs if they were sad or upset about hockey no longer being free on CBC.
“I think it’s sad. I think it means less access to hockey for people who particularly live in rural, remote areas of Canada. It’s a tradition,” Hamilton Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner told reporters.
Hockey Night in Canada didn’t start on CBC
It might be shocking to some, including Hepfner, a former broadcaster in the private sector, that what became Hockey Night in Canada didn’t start on CBC. In fact, it started on CFRB in Toronto and was carried on the Canadian National Railway Radio network starting in 1931.
That’s a full five years before CBC Radio even existed.
Like all things back then, CBC used their government funding and preferred licences – meaning better signals – to muscle out the competition. So, by 1936 when CBC radio started, they were able to bring over Foster Hewitt and make people believe that they created our national pastime of listening, or watching, hockey on a Saturday night.
The broadcasting of hockey games goes even further back in Canadian history with radio station CFCA, owned back then by the dreaded Toronto Star , broadcasting games as early as 1923. That was a full 13 years before CBC even existed, and long before Maple Leaf Gardens existed, with games still being played at the old Mutual Street Arena.
A return to tradition, not a break from it
That Rogers is now the main broadcaster for NHL games in Canada isn’t a break from tradition, it is a return to tradition. When CFRB was broadcasting those early games that gave way to Hockey Night in Canada , the station was at that point still owned by Edward Rogers Sr., the station’s call letters stood for “Canada’s First Rogers Batteryless.”
Rogers Sr. had been a pioneer in the radio business, and that included broadcasting hockey. Today, his grandson Ed is not only the main owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, but also their main broadcaster Rogers Communications, which owns Sportsnet.
While Rogers spent more than $11 billion to buy the rights to broadcast these games, and therefore charge ad or subscription rates to watch them, CBC just wanted to give them away for free. CBC’s view was that they should continue offering Hockey Night in Canada without paying anything for the rights, nor charging anything to the viewers.
That’s a view not situated in reality. Though if you pay attention to CBC, that shouldn’t be surprising.