The advice to Rogers Sportsnet is simple: If you’re going to jack up your prices, fix your app and improve your panels.
On Thursday, the broadcaster announced it is hiking fees for its subscription-only service, with the premium tier, which gets viewers access to every NHL game next season along with a rather impressive list of other sports and leagues, is going up $75 to $324.99. The basic package, which gets you the four regional channels and limits your viewing to your home region’s hockey team, is also going up $50.
That is the first substantial increase to the top-tier package in at least a year. When the NHL Live service was shuttered and all Canadian hockey fans looking to subscribe to a league-wide package were shuffled to Sportsnet’s premium tier in 2022, the whole package cost just $199.99.
“Sportsnet+ is the most comprehensive live sports streaming experience in Canada,” a Sportsnet spokesperson said in an email. “This update reflects that great value for sports fans looking for the best sports content in the country, while remaining competitively priced with other options in the market.”
Are fans really getting $125 worth of improved service? Given how poorly Sportsnet’s app functions, it’s hard to argue how. Just this past season, fans trying to watch Vancouver Canucks games while being in B.C. were regularly told, incorrectly, they weren’t in the correct broadcast region. Further, the app itself is underwhelming, despite its impressively large set of global sporting broadcast rights — NHL games are generally archived, but not at the 100 per cent rate viewers would expect, and trying to watching more minor games is a hit-and-miss experience, although of late it’s been more consistent.
But when you stack up the functionality and the cost with other services available in Canada, the Sportsnet price point still makes you go pale.
Native New Yorker Jonas Worth has lived in the Lower Mainland for years and has been a streaming subscriber to Sportsnet’s premium package and its previous iteration as NHL Live for years. He laments the decline in technical quality — you were able to select home or road broadcasts at your leisure with NHL Live — as well as the ever-surging price.
“I understand how the business of TV contracts impacts pricing in all sports, especially as someone who watches a variety of European soccer and F1,” he told me. “But as an Islanders fan who lives in Vancouver, I ultimately only have one choice, and this is a major increase for Sportsnet that has me wondering if I can afford it with all the other subscriptions that offer more price points. In the NHL TV days, I could select ‘Islanders only’ as a package, but those options seem to be gone.
“I might sit this one out until playoffs, despite the excitement of a No. 1 draft pick and a brilliant new GM.”
Fubo, which has English Premier League rights as well as One Soccer, and has the bulk of Canada Soccer matches plus a bevy of other streams and services, charges $230.99 for a year. DAZN, which has Champions League soccer and the full NFL Sunday Ticket package, charges $249.99 for a year.
TSN, which somehow has a worse streaming app (on Apple TV anyway), is currently running quite the cut-price summer rate: $138.99 for a year. Like Sportsnet, subscribers to TSN+ get a huge collection of global sporting rights, plus additional camera feeds during live events such as F1 races and tennis and golf majors.
If you want to watch a sport in Canada, it can be done. This is a true golden age for Canadian sports fans — but it’s a pricey era too. Even now, when you subscribe to cable, getting monthly access to Sportsnet and TSN runs you about $25 per month. That doesn’t get you all the games that are on offer when you subscribe to their streaming packages, but it still gets viewers Vancouver Canucks games and (maybe) all the Blue Jays games you want, and certainly all the curling and CFL you want.
If you subscribe to the four packages above, you’re going to pay nearly $1,000 for a year — or $83 per month.
Are you getting your money’s worth? You can find any game you want … but for the prices Sportsnet (and to a degree DAZN) is charging, where’s the on-air quality?
That’s the other frustration in this, the slow winnowing away of the off-game programming. DAZN does get the excellent Hard Knocks series and the NFL Network’s programming, plus they do carry the main Sunday broadcasts, but when you’re watching Champions League soccer matches there is no halftime analysis, there’s no pre-game buildup, and there is no post-match analysis either.
Sportsnet does still have panels, but the degree to which they have degraded the Hockey Night In Canada brand, how is a Saturday game different from a Tuesday regional broadcast now? That’s not a shot at the excellent regional crews in this country, but in-season Saturday night used to mean something extra for the viewer.
At the end of the day, prices are going to go up. Fans shouldn’t feel gouged, but sadly, more and more, they are.