No need to drop gloves over end of NHL on CBC

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The ringing of the final buzzer for the CBC’s long run with the weekly Hockey Night in Canada NHL telecast was inevitable, given the vast changes to the sport and the sports broadcasting game over those 74 years.

The end of the side deal with Sportsnet that had allowed the CBC to keep showing NHL hockey on Saturday nights for the past 12 years – despite all but relinquishing the program to the private-sector channel in 2014 – now gives the struggling public broadcaster a chance to reconsider its broader mandate in our fractured digital age.

Hockey itself is obviously tightly woven into the national fabric. But the business of televising the professional men’s league is indisputably a multibillion-dollar commercial enterprise that needs no public-sector assistance to distribute its product.

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Back in the 1930s, when the new CBC started broadcasting the NHL on the radio, and in 1952, when the CBC was the only thing resembling a domestic television network, its founding mission was to offset the magnetic pull of U.S. broadcasting signals. Hockey was an obvious unifying force, and the CBC was the only game in town.

But this past is a foreign country in today’s digital-media multiverse. Not only are there hundreds of specialty channels, but Netflix and services like it have revolutionized the landscape. And hockey, with teams across the Southern U.S. made up of millionaire mercenaries vying for Lord Stanley’s Cup, has changed a bit, too.

Sportsnet, owned by cable giant Rogers, had already taken over the country’s marquee Saturday night hockey broadcast in 2014. But it allowed the CBC to simulcast the show on the public broadcaster’s main national channel. That meant that people could still use an antenna in at least some parts of the country to watch the Saturday night games for free, just as Foster Hewitt’s listeners had in the Depression. Few did. Non-playoff Saturday night games were also free on the CBC’s online app, CBC Gem.

But the two sides could not agree on terms to extend this deal for the next 12 seasons. To watch hockey on a screen on Saturday nights you will need to join the masses of Canadians who can already watch Sportsnet’s television channels, sign up for a cable package that includes them, or pay for its Sportsnet+ app. Or go to a sports bar. Or have friends with cable. The service will admittedly no longer be free. But NHL hockey is big business. Businesses tend to charge money for things. (Watching games on weeknights has long meant subscribing to TSN or Sportsnet.)

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For the rights to televise these Saturday night match-ups, Sportsnet paid the NHL quite handsomely. The company is gambling that it can attract enough eyeballs and sell enough ad spots, and cable and app subscriptions, to make a profit. In 2013, the deal was worth $5.2-billion over 12 years. For the next 12 years, the price is $11-billion.

There is no universe in which the CBC, with its $1.4-billion-a-year annual taxpayer subsidy, should try outbid the private sector for these rights, at these prices. Even the BBC long ago abandoned competing for the expensive rights to show live TV broadcasts of the top level of English soccer, leaving it to Sky Sports when the Premier League was created back in 1992. (The BBC does show highlights for its Match of the Day program, and retains live rights for the secondary FA Cup tournament as well as radio rights.)

The government and the CBC should take this inevitable change as a chance to double down on offering programming others do not, and to re-examine how and why its efforts to attract more English Canadian TV viewers to its other shows so far have failed to yield results: In prime time, the CBC is well behind CTV and Global, although these private-sector rivals run a lot of U.S. programming that the CBC does not.

The CBC is long overdue for a comprehensive review of its mandate, an exercise that should weigh its reliance on advertising, its efforts to adapt to a digital-first future – and its ability to appeal to a wide swath of Canadians with content they cannot find elsewhere.

For now on Saturday nights, the CBC says it will lean into to its commitments to Olympic and women’s sports, including the Professional Women’s Hockey League, and we say good for them. Canada’s national public broadcaster – which also says it will keep its Hockey Night In Canada brand for itself – should be skating into corners left empty by the private sector not hopping over the boards to compete with it.