The St. Louis Blues will be seen for all 82 games online this season. It raises some questions about the NHL’s online platform though.
The St. Louis Blues announced all of their 82 games will be locally streamed online starting with the 2016-17 season. Now, if you actually think about it, it is still a little bit limiting.
Only fans who have access to Fox Sports Midwest will be able to stream the Blues games. So a Blues fan in Nova Scotia or Baton Rouge still won’t be able to see the games unless they subscribe to the NHL Gamecenter ,or NHL.tv or whatever it is these days, for a fee.
However, it seems odd that the NHL would agree to this in the first place. Under the previous agreement, even fans in St. Louis would have to buy the Gamecenter in order to stream games. Now, with the majority of Blues fans residing in areas that have Fox Sports MidWest as part of their television provider package, it seems the NHL could be losing business in that aspect.
I’m sure the league has numbers about the amount of people that could be lost in a deal like this. They may realize that most people in the St. Louis area or just outside probably aren’t going to shell out the money to see the couple games a season they might miss when they were out of town or away from a television.
On the same token, this deal isn’t Blues specific. It seems to involve all teams that have their coverage with Fox Sports regional networks.
So, all fans who have certain reginal networks as part of their television packages will be able to stream the hockey games from those regional networks. What will be interesting is how they figure out what region you are in.
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For example, with AT&T Uverse, certain packages give you access to other regional Fox Networks. However, when you are watching television, you can’t watch the live games on those channels because they are blacked out. Will the same be the case for the online games?
If you have Direct TV and access to those same channels, will you be able to watch the streams of all games? It seems unlikely and the NHL probably has a way to limit this sort of access, but it is questions like that which make the decision a bit odd for the league given the amount of time and effort they have given pushing their Gamecenter in recent time.
As previously stated, perhaps the NHL knows what is going on. The Gamecenter is designed to help out the fans who have moved out of an area and still want to watch their team. The amount of people this new deal may affect will likely be small. However, there are bound to be a few lost customers.
If I’m on a work trip to Joplin, Missouri, which has happened in the past, I am no longer going to be tempted to buy access to Gamecenter. I know I’ll be able to stream the game because I have FSM at home.
This decision definitely helps out Blues fans. There are lots of scenarios that cost people in the St. Louis area to miss games and now perhaps they won’t need to. They can have the Cardinals game on the television and stream the Blues.
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You can follow the team on business trips and not have to listen to the opposition announcers. Fans can now see every single game all season long since the games on NBC Sports will also be streamed on their app. It’s an excellent deal for the average fan that will benefit from it. There’s nothing wrong with this deal at all.
It’s simply a bit head scratching from the layman’s point of view. It will be interesting to see if the NHL continues to push Gamecenter as hard now that fans won’t be forced to use it in those formerly dire situations.