Quote:
Originally Posted by polak
It's not that hard to figure out how it's going to work once cable inevitably dies.
NHL Game Center will be how you watch NHL hockey games. Exclusively. You'll download the Game Center app just like you do with Netflix or whatever and you'll pay your $200 for the season or something and have quality streaming.
You'll probably see a massive market correction in salaries and values of professional sports, but the appetite for Sports and normal Television isn't going to go away and people will figure out a way to capitalize on that appetite. Also NHL ratings are tiny and the NHL is a gate driven league so it should be less impacted than say Baseball.
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Baseball is mostly gate driven, too, I believe, but I wouldn't be so sure this doesn't impact the NHL. Baseball gets away with having fancy new stadiums because their owners don't threaten to relocate (Loria excluded) nearly as often as NFL owners do and they can keep ticket prices low due to the sheer amount of games they play.
With the NHL, we're starting to see what happens with Canadian teams when the price of a ticket doesn't match the quality of play on the ice. Look at Winnipeg already starting to see attendance drop. Vancouver might actually be the best example. It is prohibitively expensive to go to a Canucks game at face value, and when they're not playing well, people in Vancouver will just find other things to do as it's simply not worth the money to attend a game. Edmonton might get away with it for a year or two in their arena just because there's a lot less to do in Edmonton but eventually if the product on the ice doesn't improve, those gate numbers are going to decline. Even the Flames are going to have some serious decisions to make regarding ticket prices if the economy doesn't improve and the team doesn't either.