ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith and took a cheap shot at the NHL last week. When New York Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay was asked on “First Take” which New York team would be the next to win a championship, he had the temerity to mention the New York Rangers, a team that apparently doesn’t matter on the national scene. Feel free to watch the rest.
This isn’t anything new. It’s been going on for a while and it won’t ever change. Just enter, “does ESPN hate the NHL” into your search engine of choice and watch the results pile up. This is an epic troll job that doesn’t get old for the network.
What Smith has to say about the NHL doesn’t matter much to me. But it should matter to ESPN colleagues like John Buccigross, Steve Levy, Barry Melrose, Mark Messier, Chris Chelios, Emily Kaplan, Greg Wyshynski and a lot of other folks whose faces and names we don’t know. They’re a team that has been trying to revive NHL coverage on a network after an absence of 16 years.
Hockey fans don’t need or want an apology, but everyone working on the NHL in Bristol deserves one. And if I’m Gary Bettman, I’ve got to wonder just how much ESPN really values me as a business partner if this is the way the network’s highest price talent treats you on air.
There’s a crisis in sports television. Most of the regional sports networks (RSNs) that have dominated home town broadcasts for decades are hemorrhaging cash and are on the brink of bankruptcy. Thanks to advent of streaming, subscriber and advertising revenues are cratering and the RSNs can’t afford the astronomical television rights fees that franchises have been used to getting. Here’s one of my favorite YouTubers with all the details.
It’s only a matter of time before the three sports impacted — the NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball — will have to evolve their broadcast model to fully embrace streaming. Anyone who’s been in the business world long enough has heard the metaphor of having the rebuild the plane while you’re still flying it. That’s the challenge those leagues will face as the RSNs begin to enter bankruptcy over the next few months.
All three leagues offer streaming of out of town games (some providers stream home games to confirmed RSN subscribers) but continue to play the blackout game with fans in certain markets where territories of multiple franchises overlap. And as I’ve noted before, when I want to watch the Mets play the Washington Nationals via MLB.TV, the league blacks out the game. That’s because MLB wants me to spend more money for the RSN that carries the Nationals because I live in Washington’s broadcast territory. As you might imagine, I’m chary to spend that money on a team that doesn’t matter much to me.
I guess that means I’m part of the problem. Bummer.
Despite the fact that the leagues can embrace a model that allows fans to watch any game they want whenever they want, old school television executives can’t seem to break their old habits. They’re already parcelling out streaming rights to multiple platforms to force fans to subscribe to all of them. We’ve already seen MLB do this by selling rights to games to AppleTV and Amazon. The NHL does it too when it tosses the odd game onto the NHL Network, which more often than not is only available on a higher priced sports streaming tier rather than on basic packages.
I’d be willing to pay a little more for a product that was complete and easy to use. That’s the course that MLS has chosen with the streaming product AppleTV has crafted for them. That seems like it should be easy to replicate. But old habits die hard and the practices of 20th century broadcast television will die the hardest of all.
Eric McErlain lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area. He blogged at Off Wing Opinion regularly from 2002-2009. In addition to writing at Off Wing, his work has appeared at The Sporting News, AOL FanHouse, NBC Sports.com, Deadspin, The Hockey Writers and Pro Football Weekly.
The RSNs really do need to open up to single-channel streaming. It's hard to justify $70/mo for a package of linear TV channels just to watch the local baseball, hockey, or basketball team play regular season games.