Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
My wife works at Shaw and I asked her about this recently, and her response was something like this (serious paraphrasing): The bandwidth that is required to stream that many items to so many households is huge. One of the reasons that Sunday Ticket is here and Center Ice is not, is that the viewership for the NFL is smaller so it isn't as much of a drain on the system.
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Bandwidth is indeed an issue for Shaw; but it doesn't have anything to do with how many people watch it. It has everything to do with how many channel spaces it takes up. So if 50% of Shaw customers signed up, they would be better off than if only 5% signed up; because they would be using the same bandwidth, but getting that much more money for it.
The reason Shaw can offer NFL-ST is really quite simple. When they are showing football; it is Sunday afternoon. To accomidate the extra channels they take away several of their Pay Per View channels; which are not being used as much during that time of day. With NHL-CI, the games are on during the evening during prime time, so to offer CI would mean fewer PPVs could be offered.