NHL deal with MLB Advanced Media pushes hockey tech to the future
The NHL's bottom line just got a lot better thanks to a new partnership with Major League Baseball Advanced Media that the leagues announced Tuesday.
Our own Sean Leahy broke down what the deal means for the NHL.
This is a deal that makes sense for the NHL. It brings the league further into the digital age and creates a new stream of revenue in the process.
“We’re coming together as partners to see what we can do in addition to our basic businesses to combine our assets and see what the possibilities are,” Bettman said. “Technology is changing virtually on a daily basis and together we think we can lead in this extraordinary time.”
For starters this is fantastic for the NHL as a business. It’s for six years for $600 million. The NHL will receive an equity stake in BAM tech of 7-10 percent. It adds another layer of revenue for a league that is locked into US and Canadian deals for a long time. The 12-year, $5.232 billion (CAD) deal with Rogers Sportsnet runs through 2025-26. The NHL’s 10-year, $2 billion deal with NBC lasts through 2021.
Both deals looked good at the time, but like with any long-term contract, by the end, the value drops somewhat on the back end. This adds more cashflow to a league that saw marquee teams have to chop their rosters this offseason thanks to a minimally increasing salary cap.
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“When we generate revenue, the beauty of our partnership with the players is the generation of revenue increases the cap because players get 50 percent and obviously there is hockey related revenue in this deal,” Bettman said.
Also, the NHL Network’s television quality is probably going to get a big boost with this package.
MLB Network has turned into a go-to spot for baseball fans and has a litany of top-tier baseball talent. Both Peter Gammons and Harold Reynolds – formerly mainstays of ESPN’s Baseball Tonight – are on MLB Network.
NHL Network is a destination for hockey, but the resources for quality don’t come close to MLB’s. In the US it's almost a destination out of necessity due to lack of coverage on other American sports networks.
The network has quality talent but not quantity, and doesn’t carry big names like MLB Network or even NFL Network. The ability for the NHL to move its operation from Toronto to Secaucus, New Jersey to use MLB’s studios is a gamechanger.
New York-area studios can give the league easier access to top-tier American NHL on-air talent.
Someone on the conference call even asked if Keith Olbermann was interested in joining forces with both MLB and the NHL. The question was probably a little off-base – because I can’t imagine the NHL having a marquee host blast the Original Six – but being in the media capital of North America changes how the league can think about its network and its possibilities.
“(NHL Network is) something we have a lot of pride in but it’s also something we recognize where there are significant opportunities to improve,” NHL COO John Collins said.
And of course, there are the online and streaming capabilities MLB enhances.
With traditional cable bundles becoming less viable as people start to pick and choose what they want to watch, better streaming will become vital as the NHL tries to stay relevant on multiple platforms.
"When you have HBO going over the top and Bob Iger’s talking about ESPN going over the top, Viacom’s networks are being kicked off cable, we had a real gut check," says John Collins, the NHL’s chief operating officer. "BAM can help us dictate what happens to our content in a time when this media landscape is going through a lot of change."
And of course, there’s the interactive component as well. As Friedman shows in his story, MLB does a tremendous job incorporating player technology into its platforms – especially buzzy items like pitch velocity.
With numbers becoming more vital in hockey with the league’s enhanced stats deal with SAP, this should help harness such tech and use it to inform fans.
“We’re going to collectively be as cutting edge as anything you’re going to find in sports,” Bettman said.
The only potential downside is the NHL and MLBAM cracking down on fan-generated content like Vines and Gifs. MLB is notoriously tough on such items.
This tech has helped push the game to new levels socially.
“We’re constantly reviewing our rules and procedures and to the extent they need to be adjusted they will be if we determine that's appropriate,” Bettman said.
But that potential drawback is so small in comparison to what fans, and the league, will gain from this package.
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Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @joshuacooper
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