NHL Business Blog: NHL To Launch NHL NETWORK ONLINE on Wednesday

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Monday, April 7, 2008

NHL To Launch NHL NETWORK ONLINE on Wednesday

This Wednesday, the NHL will get set to launch a seven channel digital network: The NHL Network Online! The Network will include shows that cover highlights, updates, on and off ice interviews, morning skates, news conferences, live events, playoff news, highlights, and features (take a breath *gasp*...) podcasts, radio programming, and archival features! They have also been able to lock up Bud Light, Cisco and Dodge to sponsor three of the channels.

One of the main objectives, if not the main objective of this venture, is to get more of their 53 million core fans to experience and hopefully become interested in more than just their local teams. The goal is to get interested in other teams and the league itself. The hope is that this will build the national scale the league so desperately needs, and maybe even get that to transfer over to other mediums such as television, where the league experienced just 1.5 million viewers on NBC and 272,417 viewers on Versus.

The NHL may or may not succeed in attaining this national scale, but the creation of two shows ("The Hockey Show" and "Livewire") on the network will certainly help. They will force fans to look at what is going on outside of their market. For highlights, people can just skip to their own teams. In the future, the NHL would be smart to create more shows, similar to television, to enhance loyalty to the NHL brand. The NHL was also smart, to focus on pulling in existing hardcore fans, as opposed to marketing to the casual fan, like they were accused of before the lockout. They will have a greater chance for success with this strategy.

Also, whether the national scale succeeds or fails, they will have at least built themselves another advertising platform which could be extremely lucrative. On top of getting sponsors for the shows, they could sell commercials like many web tv sites do, essentially acting like a tv network except on the internet! Plus they could sell banner ads, to monetize further. As more and more dollars pour into online advertising, this revenue source could eventually someday rival or eclipse TV revenue.

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