US - 'Out of Market' Subscription

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Hi my Yankerican buddies. Wondering if you guys can help me. I've just subscribed to the NHL Gamecenter Live (because I'm fed up of digging all around the internet to find a crappy quality and highly illegal stream). I notice it says that the games shown on it are the 'out of market' ones. In the UK we don't have this stuff, so I investigated what it meant... Apparently it means that people who can not see the game on their local TV channels, will be able to watch the game on there, but they will NOT be able to watch it on there if it's being shown on their local TV.

To me, living in the UK, will this mean that I will be able to watch EVERY game on there, seeing as no NHL games are shown on TV in the UK? I hope so - it's really good value if so.

Thanks for your help.

 

I do hope you're right. I've paid $49.99, or about £32 or so, for all games, all season in that case. Good value in my book (only slight concern is that I will want to watch quite a few games at work, and I think our internet bounces off a proxy in the US, so may show a US IP, but I'm not totally sure how it works). I've just watched Caps vs Sens and the stream quality, and tools available during, pretty awesome.

I find the 'blackout' situation over there highly strange though.

 

Couldn't they just make channels national instead? More commercial value, no blackouts.

 

Impressed with NHL Gamecenter Live though. Unimpressed with Caps!

 

They do it in the NFL too though. If your team doesn't sell out the stadium on Sunday, you won't be watching at home.

 

Thing is, if they use a blackout all it does is force people to find other ways to watch the game (which there are), meaning they lose both ways. I think it's a pretty out-dated model.

 

As Gaear mentioned, all nationally broadcast sports leagues do this - not just the NHL. It's because the leagues have deals in place with national TV stations, but since many of the games are played at the same time, there needs to be different broadcasts in different areas to maximize the number of people who tune in.

I'll use the example of the NFL Sunday Ticket, as that's the only subsrciption based sports programming I pay for. I get to watch all the games on the NFL Sunday Ticket except the games carried by the local affiliate. Because I live in the Baltimore area, there are two "local" games - the Baltimore Ravens and Washington Redskins. And if you try to pull those games in using the Sunday Ticket, it will say the game is blacked out. However, in those situations, since they are on the local affiliate, you can still watch those games - just on a different station.

Typically blackout rules only apply to very specific areas - not the entire area where the game is being broadcast. I grew up in north central Pennsylvania - a couple of hundred miles away from both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia - the two "local" sports markets. We were outside the blackout zone so we always were able to get the broadcast even if the game didn't sell out. The larger point here is the UK isn't a local market to any North American sports franchise, so yes, you should get all the games.

 

Baseball seems a bit different though. For example, the local Fox Sports affiliate (a standard cable channel, not premium) broadcasts basically all the games here, and they air to everybody whether the games sell out or not. Of course there are 81 of those instead of 8.

 

It's still an outdated system . You could just find a stream on the internet, or maybe even use an online proxy to mask your locality to fool the NHL Gamecenter site into thinking you're not in the blackout zone. Do that with your laptop via HDMI or on your HTPC, and you can watch it on your big telly. I definitely think they need to modernize it a bit to keep their profits avenues going, as I don't think this blackout system will work much longer once people wise up.

Main point of the thread though, it's retardedly good value for me over here . Stream quality is HD, with slow-mo, rewind, fast forward, replay parts of the action and all sorts... best I've seen. For £30 for all the seasons games, you can't go wrong. Bravo NHL. Shame jerseys and stuff is so expensive though and looking at the site, they only deliver to US/Canada. There are 'mail couriers' I could use I guess, but I bet there are cheaper ways over there to buy the merch rather than directly from NHL, right? $130 for a single jersey is daylight robbery.