Rogers announced Thursday it has sold off the exclusive rights to Monday Night Hockey to Amazon, meaning for the next two seasons, national Monday night games during the regular season will be exclusive to Amazon Prime subscribers.
Rogers talks about how “thrilled” it is with the announcement, but this deal doesn’t help Sportsnet with audiences, it’s about whatever money Amazon is paying Rogers for these rights.
Rogers famously spent $5.2 billion for the national rights to NHL games for 12 years (2014-2026), and has since learned it overpaid for those rights. It gets some money back from sublicensing French rights to TVA Sports, and now it’s getting more back from Amazon with this deal.
With Mondays exclusive to Amazon, Rogers retains exclusive national windows on Wednesday nights and Saturday nights, as well as all NHL playoff games. Regional rights are unaffected.
There aren’t many details on what Amazon NHL games will look like, except that they won’t be Sportsnet productions and will have new broadcast teams.
This is the first time a streaming service has acquired exclusive broadcast rights to NHL games in Canada, and in that sense Rogers is right in calling it a “milestone” rights deal. Amazon hopes to use Monday night games involving Canadian teams to push hockey fans to become Amazon Prime Video subscribers.
The deal could be a bit of a boost for TVA Sports, whose rights aren’t covered in the agreement. If the network airs Canadian NHL games on Monday nights, it could see some tuning from anglophone NHL fans who don’t want to subscribe to Amazon.
For reference, last season Sportsnet had a total of 27 national Monday night hockey games. Here were the number for each Canadian team during the 2023-24 season:
- Toronto Maple Leafs: 7 games
- Montreal Canadiens: 5 games
- Winnipeg Jets: 5 games
- Ottawa Senators: 4 games
- Vancouver Canucks: 3 games
- Calgary Flames: 2 games
- Edmonton Oilers: 2 games
The Globe and Mail reports Amazon will get 26 games per season as part of the deal.
The rumour of Rogers selling rights to Amazon was first reported by YYZ Sports Media on April 1.
Listening to English play-by-play while watching the French channel is a Montréal tradition that goes back to at least Dave Van Horne and Duke Snider.
Very interesting development.
Lot’s of people have Amazon Prime simply because it offers better delivery options and service. So, not a big road block to access the NHL games. It’ll be interesting to know if Amazon will have commercials on those games.
I don’t blame Rogers for doing this. One, they seem to have over paid for the NHL rights back in 2014.
But, the Covid shutdown of hockey didn’t help either. It seems they need to do something to recoup some of that cost.
I’m a little surprised that they don’t put more games onto the CITY TV network during the week. I would certainly like to see more games on CJNT-DT 62.1 in the Montreal area.
Having a Saturday game on at the same time as CBC splits the audience. They should offer a game on a weeknight. And even consider offering a game on Saturday or Sunday afternoons.
As a side night, I don’t always need to have a game with Canadians teams in it. I just want to have a game with a good match up.
And lots of people don’t have Amazon Prime, so it remains a roadblock for them. It’s an additional service you have to pay for to access NHL games, in addition to Sportsnet and (if your team’s rights are held by them) TSN.
It doesn’t make sense financially for them to do so. Having games on Sportsnet encourages people to subscribe to that channel, and putting a game on Citytv during the week means they can’t get simultaneous substitution ad revenue from it.
Since they control the ads on both networks it doesn’t really matter.
There are options to watch those — Sportsnet is broadcasting all playoff games on at least one of its channels — but obviously matchups with Canadian teams will get priority.
Good point! Thank you so much for all of your insight. I bllame Scott Moore!
Ever since Rogers signed the NHL deal I’ve been reading that Rogers overpaid. However, when I look at the Sportsnet financials on the CRTC website it shows Sportsnet’s operating income before the deal was about $40 M per year, it then rose to over $130 M per year for 2018 and 2019, and now it’s down to about $65 M per year. The rise was likely because of the NHL deal. While the decrease was likely caused by a number of factors including higher NHL rights fees, subscribers falling from 7.2 M in 2018 to 5.8 M in 2022, and Rogers’ inadequate response to losing subscribers to cordcutting (high prices and a perpetually buggy app).
Customers have been cutting the cord because they were frustrated with high prices and terrible service, so what did Rogers do to attract cordcutters? They offered high prices and an app with bugs they can’t or won’t fix. The initial price for the Sportsnet subscription model was $25 per month – a price much higher than what cable customers paid. While the Sportsnet app has been plagued with the same problems (buffering, crashing, audio video out of sync, being logged out, and casting not working) for years. These problems have resulted in the app having a 2.7 rating on the Play Store.
Now we’ll just have to wait and see if Amazon is any better than Sporstnet.
This is an important point to keep in mind. While the CRTC-reported financials don’t tell the full story, Sportsnet as a whole still makes millions of dollars a year.
The subscriber numbers also paint an incomplete picture since they only include regulated TV subscriptions, not those who buy Sportsnet streaming directly.
This will be interesting. For an NHL fan using RiverTV who only gets games on Saturday’s via CB, this is welcoming. Now I will have access via my prime account to view more games. If things go well wonder if Amazon will try to get more games after the season is done.