Rogers Will Broadcast 500 Hockey Games, Starting Next Season

Hockey fans can enjoy 500 regular-season games broadcast in Canada under a 12-year agreement between Rogers and the National Hockey League. This means a total of 1,250 hours of nationally televised hockey, peppered with a series of NHL player profiles and content about locals. Meanwhile, the telecom giant is making arrangements with advertisers that will help it pay off the $5.2 billion investment.

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Advertisers were told that Rogers has plans to broadcast games across 13 different Canadian TV channels, including City, Sportsnet and FX Canada, according to the Ottawa Citizen, but at this moment it isn’t clear whether CBC’s Coach’s Corner and its co-hosts, Don Cherry and Ron MacLean, will be part of the telco’s programming umbrella.

Televised games will include regional broadcasts of 82 regular season games played by the Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames, and Edmonton Oilers. Another 53 Toronto Maple Leafs games will be broadcast, with 40 of them carried across the country.

“I would not only expect, I would demand that all our games will be available on your smartphone, on your iPad, wherever you want to go,” Moore said, before stepping back from his vision a little.

“We have national rights to all games Saturdays, Wednesdays and Sundays. We don’t have all regional rights across the country — but we have the majority.”

Some games will be broadcast through a sublicencing agreement with the CBC and TVA, which will air about 300 games in Québec, and other hockey content will be available on radio and Rogers-owned digital-platforms.

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