The most ludicrous example involves being 450 miles from home. 450 miles away in another state where my favorite team is not the local market. But thanks to the wisdom of the NHL, I am restricted from watching a gamecenter feed because I am too close to my local market. Say what? I might as well be 4500 miles from home.
Broad Street Hockey goes into more details on why they would like to see blackouts ended:
Blackouts run up the cost for hockey fans
Blackout restrictions are completely backwards, especially in an Internet world when more and more people are ditching the old-school, expensive cable/satellite subscription.
But obviously if you’re cable or satellite company like Comcast or DirecTV, you want the customer’s money. All of it. Your entire business model is based on people not just paying for what they watch, but paying for a big, fat bundle of channels each month, even if they only watch a handful of those channels.
And this right here is the exact reason why NHL games are blacked out so frequently, unless you follow those specific rules set out by the TV networks and the big companies that provide those networks to you.
You’re probably familiar with how it all works, but in case you’re not, here’s the walkthrough.
Welcome to Comcast Country! (Getty Images)
If you live in what the NHL considers the Philadelphia market, you cannot get Flyers games in any form other than via your television or satellite subscription.
This means you have to pay for a cable or satellite subscription that includes CSN Philly, The Comcast Network *and* NBC Sports Network. Comcast is the biggest TV provider in Philadelphia, so using their website and a Philly zip code — 19130 — we looked up the cheapest cost to acquire all three of these channels. It’s $49.99 per month, and that’s if you get just a cable subscription and ignore the fact that it’s 2015 and you basically need the Internet to live.
So at the absolute cheapest, if you want to watch all Flyers games and you live in the Philadelphia market, you need to spend $500 per year — and that’s if you only keep the cable subscription during the 10 months of the season. It’s also the absolute (probably unrealistic) bare minimum price.
It gets worse if you live away from your team
If you live outside of what the NHL considers the Philadelphia market, it’s a lot more complicated. You don’t get games via your local channels — since you’re not local — so you need to buy a package like NHL GameCenter Live or NHL Center Ice to get those games. At the absolute cheapest during the 2015-16 season, you can buy a single-team package that gets you just Flyers games for $105 for the season. (We’ve already discussed why that price is too high.)
In an ideal world, you could pay for that product and get all the games. But blackouts fuck that all up.
Games on national TV — NBC Sports Network and NHL Network — are blacked out, so you’re still tied down to an expensive cable or satellite subscription because you need those channels. The only way to watch those channels is if you pay for them via subscription.
