Seriously how are they going to have game 5, with the Cup in the building, only on a cable channel in the US?! Not even on ESPN+! 😠
I used to pay for the old NHLstreams “service”. I already pay for ESPN+ and Hulu, but I still need to pay another $65 (last time I checked) just to get live streams added to Hulu. I would pay that directly to the NHL to get the playoffs. I would pay for the full year of their streaming platform if they didn’t black out the playoffs (and feel free to fact check me if that’s changed in the last few years, I gave up on checking every year). Bundling with cable just needs to die already.
The math just doesn’t work with fully unbundling. I’m not defending bundling at all, but the alternative doesn’t add up. Let’s say Hulu Live has 5 million customers paying $2.75 in carriage fees for TNT (numbers from a quick web search and approximated). That means Hulu pays $13.75 million to TNT, and TNT gets that whether or not a subscriber watches TNT or not.
If TNT went unbundled and their own way ala Disney+, and only took 10% of subscribers, you’d be paying $27.50 to keep TNT going at their current carriage fees. And that’s assuming they could continue to charge the same pricing to advertisers. If their subscribers go from 5 million to 500,000, no advertiser is going to pay the rate that TNT charges now, so there is more money to make up.
Unfortunately, especially with live sports, bundling channels together is the only way it’s going to make financial sense to run a network like TNT. And that’s just factoring in Hulu, if all the other streamers and cable companies went that way it’d just be worse.
Oh I know the math doesn’t work out for TNT. But I don’t want TNT. I want NHL. I want to pay the NHL to get the NHL. I’m not going to pay $65 a month for a full cable bundle just to get the NHL. Also I’m not going to pay with blackouts for a team that is literally 4 hours away from me for home games.
Middle-aged man yells at clouds, and all that, I know.🍻
