Updated Sept. 12 with Bell announcement about TSN Premium.

We’re just about ready to start the new era of NHL on Canadian TV, as the second 12-year Rogers deal finally gets under way. And yesterday, the company that negotiated an $11-billion deal announced its national broadcast schedule for the 2026-27 season and included this subtle notice:

“Monday Night Hockey, which is exclusive to Sportsnet+”

Oh, I thought, that sounds suspicious. Sure enough, if you get into the weeds, you see that people who subscribe to Sportsnet through their TV provider will have to get a $13/month add-on to watch those Monday games, which includes about a half-dozen games from each Canadian team through the season.

Those who subscribe to Sportsnet+ directly won’t have to add this add-on. They get it with the $30/month or $250/year subscription (oh wait, it’s $35/month and $270/year starting in less than two weeks).

And if that wasn’t enough to hammer the self-serving nail, subscribers to Rogers TV services (including Shaw/”Rogers West” and Shaw Direct) also won’t have to pay extra. In fact, they’ll get three new digital channels on their TV grids so they won’t have to switch to the streaming app to watch the games, they can just change channels like regular TV.

Whether you call it “shrinkflation” or nickel-and-diming (loonie-and-toonieing?), Rogers is now demanding more for less.

It’s a move that will have consequences for fans and for Rogers.

Incentivizing cord-cutting

If you’re in an area that has Rogers/Shaw available as a TV option, this move is clearly meant to incentivize you to switch to Rogers. And while Rogers says it is open to other TV providers also reaching agreements to provide these Monday games for free to their subscribers, I would be shocked if that happened quickly to those providers’ satisfaction. Who wants to see their cable bills go up $13/month just so they can watch their favourite team half a dozen more times during a season on a Monday night?

For Rogers (or whichever Rogers executive thought this up), it seems like a win-win. You either get people to switch to or stay with Rogers TV, or you get your competing TV providers to fork over a bunch more money for the rights to these games.

But where Rogers TV isn’t an option, this move will also push people to cut the cord and switch to streaming.

It used to be that live sports was the killer app, the thing that kept people on cable. Subscribing to TSN and Sportsnet cost less through cable TV providers than they did directly (especially when subscribing to both), and TSN and Sportsnet accepted that because you get a lot more penetration through cable than you do selling directly.

This move seems to be another indication that the tide has turned there. Sportsnet+ standard, which also includes the Monday games, will cost $35/month or $270/year. If you’re paying, say, $10/month for Sportsnet, Sportsnet One and Sportsnet 360 through your cable provider, plus $156/year for that add-on, it’s now cheaper to get Sportsnet+ directly. Rogers also offers a bundle with Citytv+ (Bravo, HGTV, Food Network, Discovery Channel, FX, etc.) for just a few bucks more.

Similarly, Bell used to offer a TSN+ add-on for TV subscribers at $8/month. That appears to have vanished recently, and your options are now $25/month for TSN or $30/month or $250/year for TSN Premium. For $38/month you can get TSN and Crave, which gives access to most Bell Media sports and entertainment content.

Since Crave costs about $22/month through a TV provider, that bundle also starts to look attractive, especially when it replaces subscriptions to channels like CTV Sci-Fi, CTV Comedy, CTV Life and USA Network.

We haven’t reached no-brainer territory yet. If you add on TVA Sports ($18/month), Corus’s StackTV ($15/month Prime Video add-on) and Teletoon+ ($6), CBC Gem Premium ($6), ICI Tou.TV and RDI ($11) and whatever independent TV services you want to subscribe to, we’re getting closer to $130/month for a series of services that would still cost you less on cable if you get a good bundle.

But it’s trending in that direction, because broadcasters make more money that way. In the 2024-25 broadcast year, according to CRTC data, Sportsnet made $522,752,902 in subscriber revenue (SN+SN1+SN360), but with the main Sportsnet channels getting an average of only $6.37 per month per subscriber (SN1 got $2.00 and SN360 got $0.49).

TSN, meanwhile, had $454 million in subscriber revenue and averaged $7.25 wholesale per subscriber per month.

(These are by far the most expensive cable channels on Canadian TV, excluding “pay TV” services like Crave)

Even if there are different overhead costs involved with selling directly, along with more volatility and churn, it’s much more profitable to sell directly to consumers.

By making Monday hockey free for Rogers TV subscribers, Rogers avoids this strategy cannibalizing its own customers, but it invites an arms race with Bell, particularly in markets like Toronto where they compete directly for TV subscribers.

CRTC complaints

Remember GamePlus? Back when Rogers got the NHL deal the first time, it decided to offer a value added service with additional camera angles, but made those available only to Rogers TV, home phone and wireless subscribers. Bell filed a complaint with the CRTC, arguing it violated the CRTC’s “undue preference” rules and was an anti-competitive move.

In 2015, the CRTC dismissed Bell’s complaint on the grounds that the feature was not “television programming” and so not subject to the rule. (It also called Bell out on its self-serving position changes, noting that just a few years earlier it had suggested doing something similar and argued it was legal then.)

I fully expect Bell or another Rogers TV competitor to file another complaint, arguing that a live hockey game with advertising is very much television programming and the paid add-on that Rogers customers are exempt from is unfair self-dealing or set so unreasonably high that it effectively makes it exclusive to Rogers customers. (The rules have also changed in the past 10 years for online broadcasters, so the 2015 decision can’t just be re-applied here.)

GamePlus no longer exists. It just kind of died a quiet death when Rogers learned that people don’t care that much about additional camera angles. (A lesson that we seem to be learning over and over again since “choose your camera angle during live sports” was first promised as a killer feature during the early days of digital cable in the 1990s.)

An arms race

If the CRTC chooses not to act, we could see retaliation from Rogers’s vertically integrated competitors, notably Bell. In fact, we may have already seen it. On Friday, Bell sent out an email to its TV customers subscribed to TSN to announce that they now have TSN Premium (formerly TSN+) included at no extra charge. The service includes feeds of sports not broadcast on TSN1-5, some additional on-demand programming, and NFL RedZone, which is starting up a new season. (Bell is also moving some of its Sunday NFL games that aren’t available on border CBS and Fox stations to premium-only feeds.) Unlike the Rogers, there won’t be additional linear channels added to the grid for this.

RedZone, La Liga and some extra NFL and NBA games won’t be as much of a draw as Canadian NHL teams, but if Bell complains about Sportsnet we could see a retaliatory complaint by Rogers over this, and complaints by Telus and Videotron against both.

Piracy

Since the announcement, a lot of people online have talked openly about piracy. They argue Rogers deserves it because they’re asking for too much money. I’m not going to make a moral judgment here, but piracy is a major concern for broadcasters and they have been making major efforts to combat it, with mixed success. Just understand that if you do pay $15/month for “100% legal all-channels” IPTV services, you’re taking a legal risk and more realistically an economic one, as they can disappear overnight without a trace and won’t be issuing refunds.

I suspect we’ll see an uptick in piracy channel use on Monday nights, but pirated feeds are still marginal because of their unreliability and difficulty to find. For the casual fan, it’ll probably be easier to just find something else to do that night, or wait and watch the highlights.

The TVA factor

For fans of the Canadiens and Senators, there’s also another alternative available. TVA Sports just renewed its NHL deal, and that includes all six Canadiens Monday games that Rogers wants to charge extra for, as well as (according to the current broadcast schedule) six of seven Senators games also affected. So rather than paying $13/month to Rogers just to have to switch to a streaming app, they can subscribe to TVA Sports and change the channel during those games.

Tune-out

The bigger risk for Rogers, though, is people just choosing to tune out and not watch those Monday games. Even worse, drifting away from hockey entirely.

That’s undoubtedly something they considered in their decision, and they’ve calculated that the risk of people walking away is overshadowed by the additional revenue from hard-core fans.

Considering how much Maple Leafs tickets cost these days, I understand that math.

This also is why Rogers chose to walk away from its agreement with CBC, pull Saturday games off Citytv, end Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi Edition in OMNI and (I’m assuming) drop its agreement with APTN as well.

With this move, and Amazon securing Wednesday nights, those Saturday games will be the only ones left on regular Sportsnet during the regular season. So as much as free-to-air games can boost the NHL’s profile in Canada and secure more advertising revenue, Sportsnet needs a reason for fans to subscribe. Saturday night games (which will now run under the Saturday Night Hockey brand since HNIC is owned by CBC) will be that subscription driver.

Short-term or long-term pain?

This is very frustrating for hockey fans. It used to be you could add RDS to your TV package (if it wasn’t already there) and you’d get the full regular season, most preseason games and the full playoffs for the Montreal Canadiens. Now, you’ll need to subscribe to three different services to get that in French and up to five to get that in English.

And who knows how much farther this could go. Without CBC and Citytv, Sportsnet will have to push more games to SN1 and SN360 on Saturday nights, which means having to subscribe to those services as well if you aren’t already.

It could be that, next season, Rogers finds its gamble hasn’t paid off and it moves those Monday games back to Sportsnet, puts Saturday games back on Citytv and rekindles third-language broadcasts. (CBC will be more difficult, since they will have probably found a way to fill their Saturday night schedule by then.)

Or it could find ways to make it even more expensive to watch hockey, as a decline in ad revenue pushes it to squeeze consumers directly even more to recoup the billion dollars a year (minus whatever TVA and Amazon pay) they’re spending for these rights.

Those decisions will be mostly based on what people like you do. While individually you might feel powerless right now, as a collective you will get to vote with your wallets.

Broadcast breakdown by team

Full schedules aren’t out yet so some of these may be off by one or two, and Sportsnet could upgrade some of its regional games to national. (It promised to lift 150 regional blackouts, and this chart only accounts for about 60 of them in English.)

Team	English			Amazon Prime Video (both languages, all Wednesdays)	French		Change in national/regional split
	Sportsnet (mostly Saturdays)	Sportsnet+ (all Mondays)	Regional		TVA Sports (Sat/Mon)	Regional
Montreal Canadiens	21	6	50 (TSN2)	7	32	45	17 more national games in French, 2 more national games in English
Ottawa Senators	21	7	50 (TSN5)	4	22+	51	6 more national games in English
Toronto Maple Leafs	39**	10	2 (SNO), 27 (TSN4)	6	22+		14 more national games in English
Winnipeg Jets	21	9	50 (TSN3)	4	6+		12 more national games in English
Calgary Flames	55 (21+34)**	8	17 (SNW) + 1 on SN+*	3	13+		42 more national games in English
Edmonton Oilers	57 (24+33)**	8	17 (SNW) + 1 on SN+*	5	33+		48 more national games in English
Vancouver Canucks	58 (25+23)**	9	23 (SNP)	2	13+		37 more national games in English

*As explained in this post on Flames Nation, the Flames and Oilers each have a game on a Wednesday that will be regional but can’t be on Sportsnet West because the other team also plays that night, and can’t move to Sportsnet One because of Amazon’s exclusivity window, so they’re on SN+ but without requiring the additional fee that the Monday games require.

**Includes regional games upgraded to national where Sportsnet has regional rights.