CBC’s NHL program draws higher audiences as shortened season means lower revenues

Higher audience ratings in a shortened NHL season will not be enough to make up for a decline in revenues for CBC/Radio-Canada's Hockey Night in Canada, said Al Dark, general manager of CBC’s revenue group. The broadcaster's marquee NHL program drew record ratings of 5.15 million viewers for a Toronto Maple Leafs playoff game Monday night, the broadcaster said, in which the team was eliminated by the Boston Bruins. In a telephone interview Monday, Dark said audience ratings for NHL games broadcast on CBC this year rose about three per cent over the course of the shortened season, which began on Jan. 19 after a 113-day collective bargaining dispute and the cancellation of nearly half of the season's games. Advertisers, he said, are following viewers as the first round of the NHL playoffs concluded Monday night and continue with the second round Tuesday evening. “Our revenue pacing is kind of where we expected it to be now that we have made up some space. Definitely, they're on the mend and advertisers are coming back,” Dark said. “The audiences really help us moving into the next year, because I’m always selling futures.” Dark said CBC establishes pricing for its HNIC advertising spots using a two-year average of the program’s audience ratings. “If our numbers are up going into next fall, when we re-project our numbers, obviously we’d be in a better position,” Dark said. Jeffrey Orridge, CBC’s executive director of sports properties, said in January that the NHL lockout caused the public broadcaster to “recalibrate” its audience and revenue projections when it was clear it could not broadcast a full season’s worth of games. At the time, he said, the shortened NHL season brought in “record” audience ratings in its first weekend, giving industry analysts reason to believe broadcasters could make up for revenues lost during the lockout. Dark said Monday that audience ratings were up 23 per cent during the first six weeks of the season before they “flattened out” and returned to “more traditional audience numbers.” He said total audience levels were up about three per cent over the course of the regular season, which ended April 28. First round playoff matchups involving Canadian teams, Dark said, helped propel higher ratings for some broadcasts in the past two weeks. He said the Toronto Maple Leafs’ return to the playoffs after a nine-year absence seemed to unleash “pent up demand” for playoff hockey in Canada’s largest market, drawing average audiences that hit 5.15 million viewers for Game 7 on Monday night, a first round record, and 4.5 million for Game 6 on Sunday. CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson said in an email that the Maple Leafs averaged 3.53 million viewers over the seven-game series, making it the "most watched round 1 series ever." He said regular season Maple Leafs games on CBC have averaged about 2.2 million viewers over the past two years. Last May, Orridge told The Wire Report that Vancouver Canucks games in the first round of the 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs averaged about 2.5 million viewers per broadcast, while the Ottawa Senators averaged about two million. The Boston Bruins eliminated the Leafs with an overtime victory Monday night, leaving the Ottawa Senators as the only Canadian team left in CBC's NHL coverage. Dark said CBC can adjust how much it charges for ads spots in playoff games based on which teams are playing, though it has limited ability to immediately cash in on higher ratings for Maple Leafs’ games since most of its ad inventory is sold before it knows which teams make the playoffs. “What we can really capitalize on is the remaining 20 per cent of our inventory,” Dark said. “There’s only so much up-side you can bring at the end of the year in the playoffs.” Greater impact will come next year when higher playoff audiences are factored into the broadcaster's two-year audience projections for pre-purchased ad prices, Dark said. CBC's contract with the NHL for the broadcasting rights to English-language, Saturday night games, is set to expire in 2014. As live sports rights rise in value, the public broadcaster could face competition for its NHL rights from competitors like BCE Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc., which are expected to leverage more content to support broadcast distribution and mobile phone businesses. Broadcast analyst Gordon Hendren, president of Charlton Strategic Research, said in a phone interview that CBC's NHL rights could become “the most valuable sports property in the country” when they come up for renegotiation as early as this summer. “Interest is going to be high. I would expect numbers to be higher than they’ve ever been before,” he said. Brian Schecter, a media consultant and president of firm Puddle Duck Productions in Vancouver, said in an interview that CBC should expect playoff audience levels to suffer in June as the playoffs run further into warmer whether due to a lockout-adjusted schedule. “It certainly hurts attracting the casual fan,” Schecter said. “The casual fan will not be watching hockey in late June no matter who is in the final.” TSN president Stewart Johnston said in a phone interview that higher regular season audiences “created excitement” in the advertising community. He said TSN also pre-sells most of its playoff advertising spots and will be rewarded in future years as the ratings are factored into the three-year averages it uses to determine rates. Johnston said the company has seen no discernible impact on TSN’s subscriber numbers due to the lockout or rebounding interest in hockey. “We saw no correlation in subscriber levels,” he said. TSN spokesman Greg McIsaac said in an email Tuesday that the channel averaged 1.134 million viewers during its first-round coverage of the Vancouver Canucks' series against the San Jose Sharks, up from an average of 758,000 per regular season game. According to CRTC data released last month, TSN, owned by BCE Inc.’s media division, reported record-breaking revenues of $374.8 million for the broadcast year that ended Aug. 31, 2012. About 35.5 per cent of TSN's revenues came from advertising, the data said, and the remainder from subscriber fees paid by broadcast distributors that carry the channel. —With reporting by Nicholas Kyonka and nkyonka@thewirereport.ca and editing by Simon Doyle at sdoyle@thewirereport.ca

CBC’s NHL program draws higher audiences as shortened season means lower revenues

Broadcast | May 14, 2013

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