when you look at the brain trust running the league. Bettman doesn’t exactly live in the real world.

i’ll just stick with my tv

This sums up quite well why I haven’t purchased the Gamecenter service. I too had seen the “lowest price of the season!” ads and was intrigued. Then I saw how much it costs. Maybe $10- $20 bucks and I’d say sure, but not $80 for the playoffs. On top of the price of cable, that’s way too much. It’d be interesting to see the numbers to see what they make of ads over the air vs what they charge for the service.

Sadly, I don’t think anyone with any sway in the NHL is watching/reading/listening to the fans. There are a lot of great ways they could be working with the streaming sites and bloggers to promote the sport, but instead, they work against us and the game.

iTunes was totally never going to work. I mean, who wants to pay for a song they can get for free, right? We know how that worked out.

is $5. I don’t care what the circumstances are: If I’m watching it on my computer, I won’t pay a cent more. And the price I’m willing to pay drops off sharply depending on what game it is. Tonight’s Sharks-Hawks game? $3. Tonight’s Panthers-Sabres game? Not worth the bandwidth. $19.95 for all six games today? I’d rather light a twenty on fire.

NHL Gamecenter, and nearly all other subscription-based online services, are absolute, complete, utter, total ripoffs. For a company like the NHL, bandwidth is cheap, especially on the scale they use it. Licensing? They already own it all. Coding and software? You can get it for free. TV-capture? They already have the War Room set up, a five-year-old could patch the feeds into a server. And those servers are probably the only real cost I can think of.

And how much money are they making off this? Let’s assume they have 500 full-season subscribers, at $180 each. And for every day of the season, they get 20 people to buy a day pass. (Obviously I have no idea how accurate these numbers are, but I’m pretty damn sure they’re on the very conservative side). So that’s $90,000 from the subscribers, and about $40,000 for the day passes. At a rate of $10 per MB per second per month, $130,000 can buy 2 gigabytes per second for seventh months. With 520 clients connected, that means they can break even with transfer speeds of nearly 4 mbps per client, 24 hours a day, for seven months straight.

For comparison, a high-quality video feed on atdhe or a similar service runs at about 700 or 800 kbps — a fifth of that 4 mbps. Additionally, an average household DSL or cable internet line probably has never even seen speeds of more than 1.5 mbps.

The prices on Gamecenter do not reflect the cost of the implementation of the service. Nor do they reflect the supply-demand costs of the service, due to the ridiculous economy of scale available with online distribution. The marginal cost to the consumer is insanely larger than the marginal cost to the NHL. Until the price falls to a tenth of what it is now, I will never even consider signing up.

I was sucked into buying Gamecenter for the entire season. I pay $20. They automatically take it out of my checking account. I should have read the entire fine print or something. I thought it was just from a month to month basis. Not installments. Oh well.

The more I am puzzled about why the NHL (and for that matter any other major sports organization that offer streaming games for a fee) isn’t moving to the micro payment system. Various online games and iTunes have used this with great success. It’s all about the psychology of it. Charge .99 a game, or a buck to make it even. So many people will say “yeah, I can spend a buck” and buy a game. So now it’s easier to impulse buy their service. Great!

Considering the fact that there are 30 nhl teams offering 82 regular season games. If one person wants to watch all of those games (and some might) you’ve just made $2460 of one guy! That sure beats $160.

Yes, I know some people will chose to only watch their team and that’s only 82 bucks, half of what the full season service costs now. But those people aren’t going to be your majority. In all likely hood, most folks will have several games out of their market that they want to watch over the course of the season. Some people love the option of watching four games at once. So make that a special deal. Four games for $3.50 or something. That will add up quite quickly. Even two games for $2 every night for all 82 regualr season games will get you just over the cost of a season subscription.

You also have the added benefit of snagging a good number people who normally would turn to streams. Provide your customers with easily accessible “cheap” high quality streams, and you’ll attract a steady base of paying customers.

Just saying.

needs to buy “some” air time. if the NCAA can show 65 teams duke it out…twice (men and women). then i think the NHL should be able to air at least half the games and all of the playoffs. don’t know how realistic that is, but it can’t hurt to try.

I think that they should go the route of hulu or other online TV services. There’s some advertising and you get your product out there to the masses. Lift the blackouts as just start streaming these games for no cost. Especially with people less willing to part with their money due to the economy at the moment why not get rid of blackouts and simply get out there as much as possible and make whatever you can on ad revenue. I know If I could get a quality stream online I’d pay for it and turn my cable off except for the internet if I could get the local team broadcasts. Heck if they just charged a reasonable amount for the online and made sure it actually worked correctly i’d be down.

I know If I could get a quality stream online I’d pay for it and turn my cable off except for the internet if I could get the local team broadcasts

Same here. That’s the only reason we still have cable.