By Erin Bury
CBC and hockey. It’s like peanut butter and jelly, Sonny and Cher, and Regis and Kelly: they work great together. After a 70-year association, hockey and the CBC are still going strong, providing the much-loved Canadian sport to its loyal fans every season that the National Hockey League plays.
But after the 2007-08 season, CBC’s contract with the NHL will expire. What to do when the contract ends would usually be a no-brainer: renew the contract, keep hockey fans’ eyes glued to the CBC and keep the advertising dollars rolling in. After all, NHL hockey games are extremely profitable for the CBC. Hockey brings an estimated $100 million in revenues to the corporation annually, as well as over a million viewers a week to its popular weekend show, Hockey Night in Canada. That also equates to over a million chances to promote other CBC programs, such as their original mini-series, dramatic programming and specials.
But officials who used to praise hockey’s place on CBC are now skating to a different tune. They want hockey to hit the showers, to be replaced with original CBC programming. Former CBC President Tony Manera recently told the Ottawa Citizen that hockey should leave the CBC, even though it is an important part of Canadian culture and makes money for the company.
So what would happen if hockey left CBC? Well, hockey fans would follow the games to CTV or TSN, where they would most likely end up, leaving the CBC to find a new way to promote their shows, and a new way to entice advertisers. There would also be hundreds of hours of airtime to fill, most likely with expensive dramatic programming.
When you combine the cost of new programming with the loss of hockey revenues it equates to an expensive loss, one that will have to made up somehow, most likely by the government and taxpayers. And as for the cultural implications, well, it would be the end of an era. Hockey Night in Canada is like Tim Horton’s…you may not like it, but you know it’s inherently Canadian.
So could the CBC do it? Could they replace a cultural phenomenon beloved by many Canadians with dramatic programming, and have the same success? Recent ratings numbers for the CBC say no. They have had a disappointing fall season so far, with the René Levesque and FLQ mini-series falling well below expectations (131,000 and 110,000 viewers respectively). New programming, namely Monday’s comedy Rumours (175,000 viewers) and Tuesday’s crime drama Intelligence, are facing the same uninterested reactions.
If new shows are having trouble attracting viewers while hockey fans are still around, how much worse will it be when they’re gone? How much worse can it even get?
And if the CBC really wants to replace hockey with other programming, they proved just how unsuccessful it would be during the NHL lockout in the 2003-2004 season. When Saturday’s Hockey Night in Canada was replaced by “movie nights”, the ratings dropped by 50 per cent. And those were American movies! Who knows how much the ratings would drop if Canadian programming was on the air?
Unfortunately for the CBC, even if they want to keep hockey it looks like they will have a long and hard battle. Bell Globemedia, the company that owns TSN and CTV, is reportedly planning on making the NHL a $1.4 billion 10-year offer for broadcast rights to games. Logically there is no way that CBC can match that, partly because their operating budget is smaller and partly because they will need all the money they have to produce new programs.
All the evidence points to one conclusion: that hockey on CBC is about to become a thing of the past, like goalies without masks. And if the CBC wants to succeed after the last game is over and the players shift to another network, it will have to revamp its dramatic programming and somehow attract the viewers it is so desperately lacking. Hockey’s demise on the CBC may be a sure thing in the near future, but what won’t be so clear is how to keep, and bolster, CBC’s audience so it won’t be game over for our lone public broadcaster.