Monthly Archives: June 2026

| TV

CBC, Citytv will no longer air NHL games

The news came in a brief, simple joint statement from Rogers Sports and Media and CBC, issued a day and a half after the end of the Stanley Cup Playoffs: “the public broadcaster will no longer carry NHL broadcasts after the current season…”

Sunday’s game, in which the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup against the Vegas Golden Knights, was the last NHL game to air on CBC Television.

Here’s what we know so far about how this shakes out:

Citytv is out too

I asked Rogers to clarify what this means for Rogers-owned Citytv, which also airs Saturday night games as part of Hockey Night in Canada. A Sportsnet PR spokesperson said NHL Saturday night and playoff games will be exclusive to Sportsnet, so no more games on Citytv either. A Citytv spokesperson said Citytv will air “entertainment programming” instead on Saturday nights, so expect reruns of Hudson and Rex and other shows unless they come up with something else.

What CBC will do with Saturday nights

CBC, meanwhile, plans to start a new Saturday night primetime show with Olympic-style sports, the kinds of sports they currently air on weekend afternoons.

CBC owns the Hockey Night in Canada brand and trademarks, and says it will continue using them for non-NHL hockey content. Right now the only organized hockey content on CBC is some weekend afternoon regular-season PWHL games.

(Sportsnet’s Hockey Night in Canada theme song, which it commissioned when HNIC lost the rights to the original hockey theme, remains Sportsnet’s property.)

How Sportsnet will schedule Saturday nights

One of the reasons Sportsnet kept CBC as part of its NHL broadcast network in 2014 is that it needed more channels to show simultaneous national games on Saturday nights. At the time, Sportsnet’s main network, the four regional channels, carried the same programming for national games, because many households didn’t have access to all four of the regional channels.

Twelve years later, most people are on a digital cable system or streaming and do have access to those channels. Add in Sportsnet One and Sportsnet 360 and it gives six channels, which for most Saturdays should be enough, even if there’s also a Blue Jays game, UFC Fight Night, curling or some other event they need to broadcast. And in a pinch, they can also bring Citytv back into the fold, use a non-sports channel like FX or have something exclusive to streaming.

OMNI and APTN third-language broadcasts

It’s unclear how this will affect Sportsnet’s partnerships with Rogers-owned OMNI or independent APTN, which broadcast some Saturday NHL games in Punjabi and Cree/Inuktitut, respectively.

Asked about these agreements, Sportsnet PR said there were no updates on this and we’d know more closer to the start of the season.

OMNI still has some over-the-air transmitters in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, and APTN has transmitters in Yellowknife and Whitehorse, so there might still be some NHL on over-the-air TV.

Both adopt the “Hockey Night” branding so would probably have to change their names if they continue.

A history recap

CBC and Citytv have been part of the Rogers HNIC plan since Rogers first acquired national NHL rights starting with the 2014-15 season. The deal with CBC was first established at four years, then extended to the full 12 of the original NHL contract.

Under the deal, CBC essentially gave over control of its signal to Rogers, who retained all advertising revenue from the (mostly Leafs) games in exchange for some on-air promotion of other CBC shows. The broadcasts also counted as free Canadian content for CBC, which was not a trivial consideration back when the broadcaster was a bit more budget-sensitive.

This fall, Rogers moves to a new NHL deal that will see it pay more than double to the league on average. And it looks like it has decided it needs to give people more of a push to subscribe to Sportsnet, even if that means losing some Saturday night fairweather fans.

The reason for this decision (and whether it was Rogers or CBC who made the call) wasn’t announced, but the fact that Rogers is also pulling Citytv out of the mix gives a pretty big hint. CBC says it tried to negotiate a new deal but the two sides couldn’t come to an agreement.

The writing was a bit on the wall two years ago when CBC lost the rights to stream NHL games that aired on CBC TV on its Gem streaming service.

The risks of going subscription-only

Whether to broadcast on over-the-air television is always a tough decision for sports leagues and their partner broadcasters. Some games for free can give people a taste of the action that would then spur them to subscribe. But too much for free and people might decide they can live without the rest.

Some leagues, like the NFL, have prioritized over-the-air while still offering some games to streamers and pay TV. Others, like MLS, have gambled on giving exclusive rights to pay services, only to face anger from teams in the league that nobody watches their games anymore.

I suspect this decision will put the NHL somewhere in the middle. The NHL is more popular in Canada than MLS, and Sportsnet is a popular service among people who follow sports. But the decision to pull playoff games from free TV means we probably won’t see record-setting audiences the next time a Canadian team goes deep. (They’ll still be high though, Sportsnet and TSN alone can still draw in millions for the right event.)

I suspect we’ll also still see Rogers running games on Citytv when they also air on ABC, to recoup that simultaneous substitution money. And if Rogers keeps running Hockey Night in Canada in Punjabi on OMNI, people who have that station over the air or on basic cable will still be able to watch the games, even if they don’t understand the language.

One winner of this decision might be TVA Sports, if it renews its deal with the NHL. There were a non-trivial number of francophone Canadiens fans who watched Saturday nights on Citytv because they either didn’t like the TVA broadcast or didn’t subscribe to TVA Sports. If TVA retains the French-language national rights (and we still don’t know if they will), then we might see a slight uptick in people who subscribe for those games.

Money talks

At the end of the day, what matters is money. Yes, Sportsnet may lose some audience and the ad revenue that comes with it, but over the past decade the focus has shifted from ad revenue to subscription revenue. And Rogers has decided that it needs to use those Saturday and playoff games to push people to subscribe to Sportsnet, because that’s where they make their money.

| Radio

The sad but understandable end of government-run automated radio services

As Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government has been tightening its belt on the public purse (while simultaneously making huge promises that push the country’s budget back in the red), various federal departments have been looking at things they can cut to save money. The most obvious targets for such cuts are things that (a) cost a non-trivial amount of money, (b) use old technology and are hard to maintain, (c) have cheaper alternatives, (d) are not used by a public that isn’t even aware of its existence, and (e) don’t employ a large number of people.

So it probably shouldn’t be surprising that this year is seeing the end of two government-run radio services that you probably didn’t know existed.

Weatherradio

On March 31, Environment and Climate Change and other buzzwords Canada’s Weatherradio service shut down for good. The network of more than 200 transmitters across the country broadcast automatically-generated English and French audio weather reports on VHF frequencies (162.55 MHz in Montreal) that could be received by anyone with a receiver tuned to those frequencies (which, in practice, meant amateur radio operators and people who had AM/FM radios that offered a “weather” option).

Besides some radio and weather enthusiasts, there was little reaction to the decision to shut down the service.

The government argues that other, more widely adopted technologies make Weatherradio obsolete. Most communities within the reception areas of these stations can access the internet on their phones and use the WeatherCan mobile app to get their forecasts. Emergency weather information can be transmitted through wireless public alerting and through emergency alerts on AM and FM radio stations, that people are more likely to be listening to anyway. And sailors will still have access to the marine VHF channels run by the Coast Guard.

Opponents to the shutdown talk about how unreliable the cell network is, particularly in more remote communities, and particularly in a weather emergency that might, say, knock out power to cell towers. While it’s a good point, it’s hard to make a case that an automated system that few people have the technology to receive would be better than (or must be paired with) a system that uses AM and FM radio stations, cellphone towers, TV stations and TV providers to all simultaneously broadcast emergency messages when ordered by the government to do so.

CHU

The other radio service being shut down is Canada’s shortwave time signal station, which operates under the callsign CHU.

The station, which broadcasts from Ottawa on 3.33 MHz, 7.85 MHz and 14.67 MHz, gives you the current time, and emits a tone every minute on the minute so you can synchronize your clock to it.

CBC radio listeners may remember when the stations emitted a tone at 1pm so people could synchronize their clocks (until they stopped doing it in 2023 in part because many people listen to the radio in ways that make it inaccurate). This is a similar service.

Run by the National Research Council, the broadcasts were ultra-precise, boasting an accuracy of under a millisecond based on atomic clocks.

But most people don’t set their clocks by radio these days. Computers and other internet-connected devices use the Network Time Protocol, and NRC is keeping its NTP servers going. Mostly, the time signal is used to test shortwave radios, or as a curiosity for someone who hasn’t heard it before.

And, though “don’t rely on the U.S.” has been a slogan of late, people who want to listen to a time station will tend to tune in to the broadcasts from WWV (Colorado) and WWVH (Hawaii) on the sexier and easier to remember frequencies of 2.500, 5.000, 10.000, 15.000, 20.000 and 25.000 MHz.

The news of CHU’s shutdown, set for June 22, has generated even less buzz, with a few hobbyists lamenting its nearly 100-year-old history but not much else.

I’ve listened to both CHU and Weatherradio over the years, and I will miss them. But if that’s the price to pay to finally get high-speed rail between Montreal and Toronto (it will, of course, actually cost way more than the price of these services), then I’ve reached the stage of acceptance that this era of automated radio is behind us.

Goodbye, soulless number-reading machines.