Why you can’t watch Hockey Night on the web outside of Canada
Ouimet, the mystery management blogger, has a great interview with the Corp’s Andrew Lundy on the changes to CBC.ca’s sports page. Lots of detail on the new branding strategy and how the changes came to be.
In the interview, Lundy answers the question a lot of folks asked in the last few months:
O: I have a lot of friends who live overseas. Every time I talk to them they ask me why they can’t watch the Stanley Cup online….
AL: Our agreement with the NHL is for Canada only. NBC and Versus wouldn’t like it if someone in Boise was watching an HNIC broadcast online, eating into their customer base. Ditto for someone in Sweden (although I don’t know who’s broadcasting competitively there).
I understand the frustation, though. We’re sending this online to a population that can watch it on main net and in HD.. why give them online? But it’s the way of the future and our numbers were, I’d say, solid for a first-time, and for games that were played in the evening (not online’s prime time by any means).
O: So that’s that?
AL: For now, that’s that. I don’t know of anyone who has global rights. Not for anything major, anyway.
O: Why doesn’t the NHL sell a subscription a streaming site of their own making? So people could pay to watch?
AL: You’d have to ask them. Major League Baseball sure does, and they do a fantastic job. But each league is different, and maybe there’s a different philosophy at play between the two leagues.
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YES! Subscription based high quality hockey coverage… bring it ON!
(We now return to normal testosterone levels)
As a podcaster (I make the Canucks Outsider) and an occasional ex-pat, i think CBC pursuing a way to get hockey to all Canadians is a key initiative and a worthy mission. Frankly few in the US is watching anyhow as i learned while traveling on business during the Stanley Cup playoffs and couldn’t even find a bar in NYC who’d play the games (there was yet another Yankees/Red Sox game on).
CBC certainly has sufficient clout with NHL – who are discounting rights heavily anyhow to get any US network to carry games at all (and Versus’ coverage is a joke but getting better) – i suggest CBC has enough clout to make this almost-essential public service happen. Bear in mind, hockey is not just sport, hockey is culture to us. Just try living overseas while your team is in the playoffs and you’ll agree with the “essential” part.
During the Canucks run, I produced a companion broadcast of the games (no, i didn’t show the actual games) to Canadian hockey fans in UK, China, Australia, … all of whom would eagerly ante up a subscription fee to view the CBC broadcasts. Also bear in mind, many border states cable packages include CBC so there are some rights cross-overs existing already.
Please do not wait for the NHL to do *something* – the CBC is the real home for hockey coverage for all of us Canadian (taxpayers) no matter where we live.
[...] in thusly with this impassioned plea for reason: DaveO Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation. June 13th, 2007 at 11:04 am PDT As a podcaster (I make the Canucks Outsider) and an occasional ex-pat, i think CBC pursuing a way [...]
[channelling Cory Doctorow...]
So on the one hand, you have a public calling for the national broadcaster to forcibly take global broadcast rights from a commercially owned and operated sports franchise, and on the other, you have the same public accusing the broadcaster of being too leftist. My head hurts.
Maybe this will be the wedge issue that finally gets said public behind Creative Commons, but if being practically strip-searched at the cinema on their way in to see a movie where pirates are the good guys didn’t do it, I doubt this will.
I admit to being iffy on the value – real or alleged – of Bill C-59 myself. Not quite sure how Creative Commons enters into the whole HNiC/CBC/NHL equation, though…?
Dwight – I think Kevin is saying (sarcastically) that he hopes hockey will be the issue that pushes all of CBC’s content to be licensed under Creative Commons – a licensing model that I certainly agree with in principle, although the reality (with having to respect third-party rights) is much different. However, I totally get the point that as a public broadcaster, our material really should be more openly accessible by our audience.
Directly, maybe not, but hockey broadcast rights and CC licensing are pretty representative of the two sides in the culture war at the moment.
As a person weened on the CBC and HNIC in the states, I was hoping to see HNIC and this was a good idea, however I think that the CBC shouldve thought about partnering with the NHL’s website and allowed those outside of canada
to view HNIC games for free or a $10 subscription fee.
Umm, hello? I take exception to the Sweden comment, since as far as I know none of the Swedish broadcasters (even the publicly-owned SVT) air hockey coverage. I don’t think that even Sky Sports in the UK airs hockey – they are all airing Premier League!
Just because you might interfer in another company’s broadcasting rights is inexcusable. Let HNIC air outside of Canada; if not the games then maybe “Coach’s Corner”.
My two cents:
Daniel,
Coach’s Corner is useless without being able to see the clips that the hosts are talking about. Those clips contain hockey games, and as such, fall under the rights of the NHL. So you can watch Don Cherry blab on about stuff, but you wont really get what he is saying because we dont have the rights to display NHL content outside of Canada.
Steve,
Subscription models don’t really work. Only a handful of people would be willing to pay $10 to view a game that is highly compressed, 320×240 pixels wide and on your computer.
In the end, this method of displaying content to our users works the best because:
1. We get to save costs because we arn’t serving non-canadians (sorry ex-pats) and therefore we can offer higher quality streams.
2. We get to actually add a third platform (online) to broadcast content that would normally only be found on TV and Radio.
In the past we would just deny everyone, Canadian or not. Remember during past olympics we would have to shut down our live radio streams for two weeks because it may contain Olympic content that we didn’t have the rights for distributing outside of Canada.
We now have the money (the technology was already around) to be able to implement this “geofence” (as we call it internally) to make our content providers happy about rights, and to make our users happy because they can now watch/listen to stuff online.
I cant wait for next year for the Olympics. If you thought our coverage in the past has been great… imagine it now that we have this geofence inplace! CBC is going to end its Olympic coverage with a bang…. I hope.
The point is, it’s not our material (either the CBC’s or the public’s). It’s the NHL’s material, and they sell us a very well-defined set of ways that we can use their material. And unlike someone copying a CD for a friend, if we stray outside the license it’s immediately apparent and the consequences are very dire.
And this is not to say that the NHL is any different than any other franchise in this respect, or bad, or greedy. They’re running a business, but they’re also making something that people really care about, and they seem to do a pretty good job of it, based on how much people do care about it, so they probably deserve compensation for that. (The Irish equivalent in terms of national sports franchises, the GAA, is a collection of amateur leagues, but even they control broadcast rights – the money goes to funding clubs and the organization in general)
It’s possible that at some point in the future a new and different set of rights might be granted to allow online viewing worldwide, but that’s not where the industry is right now. And unless you’re calling for the nationalization of hockey or something equally kooky, neither the CBC nor any other organization has (or should have) the ability to compel the NHL or anyone else to hand over IP rights they don’t want to sell. If there was enough of a demand, addressed to the NHL, maybe they’d set up their own subscription-based service or partner with us to provide the games online worldwide, but that’s their decision.
[...] A big issue has to do with intellectual property (IP) rights. Here’s an exchange I saw on CBC about why the Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) and the Stanley Cup cannot be online to overseas web [...]