The National Hockey League season came to a close this month and with it came the end of an era as longtime partners Rogers and CBC were unable to come to a new agreement for NHL broadcasts.
So fans will no longer find NHL games on CBC platforms and will, at this point, only be able to watch if they pay for a Sportsnet cable or streaming subscription.
Rogers Sports and Media, the parent company of Sportsnet, recently renewed its agreement with the NHL for the exclusive Canadian English television broadcasting and streaming rights in an $11.2-billion deal for the next 12 years.
It first acquired those rights in 2013, for $5.2 billion at the time, but struck an agreement with Canada’s public broadcaster to air playoff games and regular-season games featuring Canadian teams on its Saturday night show Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC) since 1952.
“As the sports rights world evolved, we did our best with Rogers to find a path forward,” Chris Wilson, the executive director of CBC Sports, told CBC’s The National. “We were unable to find a solution that satisfied both partners.”
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The cable and telecommunications giant will also no longer air NHL games on its traditional over-the-air channels CityTV and OMNI, meaning that for the first time in 74 years there will be no men’s NHL hockey on conventional television in Canada. Though sports experts say fans will likely be disappointed by the move, there are other opportunities for CBC to draw viewers to emerging leagues.
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Wilson told CBC’s The National that money is “probably the biggest reason” for the partnership not moving forward.
“They’ve got big plans and they have to monetize it as a business,” he said. “We weren’t able to find a number that made sense for both.”
But viewership also figures in, according to a statement from Sportsnet, noting that HNIC viewership on CBC had reached a 12-year low this past season, down 70 per cent from 2014, while the audience on Sportsnet’s platforms has doubled in that time.
“Rogers is no longer wanting to throw CBC a bone,” said Michael Naraine, an associate professor of sport management at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.
He says it’s in Rogers’ best interest to concentrate access to one of its premiere assets rather than fragmenting it and allowing CBC to keep even a small portion of the NHL audience.
At the same time, he says, it appears Rogers is making an “economic calculus” that Canadians have become more accustomed to digital streaming subscriptions than they were in 2014 and will pay up if they want to keep watching NHL games.
Naraine says CBC is at a disadvantage when it comes to the cost of competing with a heavy-hitting private broadcaster like Rogers for sports rights.
And it’s not just competing with traditional platforms, he says, but also streaming services like Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Paramount+ and Netflix â all of which have ventured into live sporting events to some degree.
“What it comes down to is essentially that Canadians have equipped the CBC with a knife in a gunfight,” he said, referring to the public broadcaster’s annual funding.
The federal government allotted $1.38 billion in operational funding to CBC/Radio-Canada in the 2026-2027 fiscal year.
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The shake up will come at a high cost for NHL fans who don’t subscribe to Sportsnet either through cable or streaming service Sportsnet+ â the cost of which has risen significantly in recent years.
A standard plan for the streaming service costs $29.99 a month or $249.90 annually, up from $14.99 per month and $179 a year in 2023. Adding Sportsnet to a cable package costs $15 per month.
Cheri Bradish, a professor of sport marketing at Toronto Metropolitan University, expects Rogers may come up with creative ways to deliver NHL content to fans, but she’s not certain how the company could offer men’s hockey to non-subscribers.
It could be a gamble to keep too much behind a paywall, she says, adding that consumers may push back, which could prompt some sort of legislative reaction in order to preserve access to an institution like the NHL.
Naraine believes there might have been more pushback had Rogers made a move like this 12 years ago, pointing to other countries like Australia and the United Kingdom that have enacted what’s known as anti-siphoning legislation.
That means that certain sporting events and other cultural broadcasts of “national significance” can’t be put behind any sort of paywall.
The U.K., for example, has a list of “crown jewels” that must be made available for live coverage on free-to-air TV, including the menâs and womenâs World Cups.
CBC said in news release Tuesday that it has plans to put a greater focus on its Olympic and Paralympic coverage, as well as the growing fields of women’s professional sports, including the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) and the women’s professional soccer Northern Super League (NSL).
CBC/Radio-Canada is a Canadian broadcasting and streaming rights holder for both leagues, along with TSN and the French-language sports networks RDS.
Though losing the NHL is a “bittersweet” moment for University of Guelph sport business professor Katie Lebel, who says she grew up watching HNIC with her family, the move doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise.
Lebel says both the business model and the audience have changed. While she’s curious how NHL fans will deal with the fallout, she sees potential for the public broadcaster to corner new and emerging sports markets.
She says many devout NHL fans are likely already paying for Sportsnet. It’s the casual or newer hockey fans who may be less likely to do so, she says, including new Canadian residents along with older viewers and people on fixed incomes.
“The easiest fan to create is someone who stumbles across a game,” she said.
“I think that same accessibility that helped introduce generations of Canadians to men’s hockey could potentially help introduce a new generation to women’s professional hockey.”
The PWHL will expand from eight to 12 teams, five in Canada and seven in the U.S., and 180 regular season games in 2026-2027.
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Lebel says the women’s league is also proving itself as an emerging business with plenty of room to expand its fanbase.
“Think of the new audiences that they could bring in,” she said. “Tapping into that growth of women’s sport.”
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