More Randomness May 24, 2006
NHL highlights are now on iTunes.
The iTunes Music Store is offering a “Season Pass” for each Stanley Cup Playoff series for $4.99. Each package includes 15-20 minutes of expanded highlights of each game in the Eastern or the Western Conference Finals or the Stanley Cup Final. For $1.99, fans can download expanded highlights of individual games. Videos downloaded from the iTunes Music Store can be viewed on a computer or iPod.
Matt from On the Wings writes:
This would be pretty cool if it weren’t for the fact that you can get free highlights from NHL.com (“Video highlights are free!”) or YouTube. Seems to me a better idea would have been not to charge for these. How is this going to attract new fans? Experienced fans already know where to get free highlights and prospective fans aren’t going to want to pay to see them, however cheap they are.
He’s right, highlights are free to get online - as well as on your tv too (you know, after that cable bill thing). I think the iTunes availability is about convenience, for putting it on your iPod, not watching it on your computer. You can do this with the other clips too, but they’re a bit harder to download and would have to be converted for an iPod (although not other portable media devices). Matt also points us to a TUAW comment pointing out this is currently only available on the US version of the iTunes store.
Matt’s point about attracting new fans is a good one - this isn’t going to do it. This is probably just for the current fans, but how many casual fans are there who will be willing to pay to download these clips? Why not offer them for free, show everyone how easy it is, and then create a season pass plan for next year? Why not just offer highlights for free, always, and then have another detailed highlight reel that’s paid for?
The NHL should be aiming for exposure over all else right now, and while I’m sure this offering is great for NHL-fan-iPod-owners-willing-to-spend, this probably won’t effect many out there and certainly won’t effect the league or its popularity.
MLB.tv is a huge success for baseball, but iTunes highlights are far from what MLB offers (like archived games or condensed games).
On another media/exposure note:
Darren Rovell writes:
Regular-season broadcasts on OLN this year drew an average of only 117,000 households, according to Nielsen, compared with the 416,000 homes that watched hockey broadcasts on ESPN and the 209,000 homes that watched games on ESPN2 in 2003-04. Last year’s season and playoffs were canceled because of a work stoppage.
“We need to grow the ratings. The NHL knows that, and we know that,” OLN president Gavin Harvey said. “We think that’s something that needs to be judged over a couple of years.”
To put those numbers in perspective, more people watched the 13 WNBA broadcasts on ESPN2 last year than the NHL on OLN this year. And NBC’s poker series, which preceded the network’s NHL playoff coverage two weeks ago, easily outdrew the hockey by more than 200,000 viewers.
The WNBA numbers don’t put anything into perspective, if anything, it distorts it. What’s the point of comparing something on ESPN or ESPN2 to OLN ratings-wise? Access to OLN isn’t close to access of the other channels. Has anything on OLN ever had better ratings than something on ESPN or ESPN2? As for poker, it’s been outdrawing a lot of things for a while. No shocker there, especially with this year’s playoff matchups.
To Rovell’s credit, he mentions OLN’s lack of reach compared to ESPN and also how it’s just not on most surfing lists. Casual observation of channel lineups would suggest it’s because OLN is rarely surrounded by the standard cable channels.
Rovell also touches a subject every hockey writer has given at least a blurb to the last couple of weeks: the large markets are gone and that’s not helping ratings.
If there ever was a year in which the league needed a little luck with large-market success stories or teams with great traditions—such as Detroit and Montreal—this is it. In the wake of the first yearlong work stoppage in pro sports history, two new broadcast partners (OLN and NBC) are airing the NHL; and neither has been able to generate anything in the way of big ratings.
...snip…
So far, the playoffs haven’t generated any additional interest for NBC, either. In fact, the ratings are down. The network’s regular-season games were watched in 1.09 million households, according to Nielsen data, and playoff games have been watched by 1.02 million households
The debate has been raging on with “good for hockey, bad for ratings?” as the question usually being asked. Either way, we know one part of the answer.
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