NHL Centre Ice Online Not Looking So Hot
I signed up for a trial account of the NHL Centre Ice Online as I described in my article earlier this week called NHL Games Now Available On The Internet.
The quality was excellent, but the coverage is very, very annoying. Enough that I would not recommend it unless you were totally aware of how it works. I signed up on Thursday night and tried it out. I watched a little bit of the Florida Panthers/New York Rangers game and I have to admit, the quality was very good. You can even watch up to 4 games at once if you want to.
The downside happened when I tried to watch the Calgary Flames game against Philadelphia. I was in Vancouver and I was blacked out from watching that game. I assumed that this was because I picked Calgary as my home city when I signed up, but then I noticed I was blocked from the Vancouver Canucks game against San Jose the next night.
I phoned into the NHL Centre Ice Online technical support line and had about a 15 minute conversation on how everything works. So here we go.
Blackout Areas For NHL Center Ice Online
The television stations have exclusive rights to the broadcasting of a game. They tell NHL Centre Ice Online what areas they are allowed to broadcast to.
NHL Centre Ice Online will then blackout the game for you based on your IP address. For those of you who do not know, your ip address is the address of your computer when it is connected to the internet. If you are located in Vancouver, then you ip address will be in a range of numbers that NHL Centre Ice Online will know is a Vancouver address.
The reason I was blocked from both the Vancouver and the Calgary games is because Alberta and British Columbia are in a complicated and overlapping coverage area. The markets overlap so the coverage can sometimes be in both cities.
My interests are in watching Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton games. So basically I won't be able to watch any of these games live because it is almost certain that either CBC, TSN, Sportsnet, or some other network will be broadcasting it in the local area. There is also PPV games that can rule it out too. I don't think I would be able to see any of these games.
What Can I Watch?
All archived games are available within a couple hours of the game finishing. So I could watch the teams I like, but only after the fact. That sucks.
Otherwise, NHL Center Ice Online is good for watching teams outside of your area and probably best to watch outside of your division and conference as the odds are better that the market coverage will be outside your zone and there will be very few games against you home team to cause a black out.
Summary
This is definitely not something that would be worth the $199 a year to sign up for. Maybe if you are an ex-pat living overseas and want to keep up to date on your favourite teams. You would be able to watch all the games live and even watch archived games that happened in the night.
If any of you have had a different experience, please post a comment. I would like to hear it.
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