As the Ottawa Senators defeated the New Jersey Devils 2-0 on Sunday afternoon in preseason action, a lot of English-speaking Senator fans had to dust off their French comprehension skills. It had nothing to do with the game being in Quebec City, though.
It was an extremely rare case of a Senators game being unavailable in English, on both TV and radio.
Bell Media’s TSN has the regional Sens English TV rights, but was up to its neck in sports options on Sunday afternoon with Week 4 of the NFL, the Ryder Cup, NASCAR, the Dodgers-Mariners game, and the first stage of the FIFA U-20 World Cup. So TSN didn’t have the Sens-Devils game in its programming lineup on Sunday.
The NHL Network carried the Devils’ TV feed, but because the Devils were in a split-squad situation, Devils TV aired the New Jersey-Washington game that was running at the same time back in Newark. The Devils also had no radio team in Quebec.
As a result, the Sens game was only available on TV through the French-language TVA Sports 2, owned by Quebecor Media. TVA carried the game, and I watched it from start to finish in Ottawa without encountering any technical difficulty.
Meanwhile, TSN 1200 radio, which historically broadcasts every game whether it’s on TV or not, didn’t have the game either. They announced just over one hour from game time that they were having technical difficulties in Quebec City, and they would not be airing the game.
It rarely happens, but it wouldn’t be the first time in the radio station’s history that TSN 1200 has had technical difficulties during a Senators broadcast on the road. But there are always attempts made, usually successful ones, to fix the problem, especially when there’s still an hour to go before game time.
But this isn’t business as usual.
Last month, the Senators confirmed to The Hockey News’ Graeme Nichols that “The radio broadcasting team will not be travelling for road games this season. It was not a decision that was taken lightly, but our radio audience will still be served with access to live broadcasts of each road game.”
So then what happened on Sunday?
If TSN 1200’s Dean Brown and Gord Wilson are no longer relying on anything more technical than turning on a TV in Ottawa, what transpired in Quebec City, as the station asserts, to qualify as “technical difficulties” that they’d call it quits on the broadcast so close to game time?
Sounds like we’ll learn more about what happened tomorrow. But the answer probably lies in one of the posts from Sens VP of Communications Ian Mendes about the situation.
With TVA Sports being owned by Quebecor, a Bell Media rival, TSN 1200 probably didn’t have permission to watch TVA Sports and effectively rebroadcast it on the radio.
This is only speculation, but perhaps TSN 1200 planned instead to patch into the raw, in-house video feed and ended up with the same “tech issue” that Mendes mentions about the ambient audio feed.
For most games, TSN 1200 will be able to freely access the same reliable TSN television feed that fans watch, or even the visitors’ TV feed if needed – neither of which will be emanating from non-NHL arenas using untried, unpredictable tech.
Again, we’ll get the explanation tomorrow, but it sure looks like Sunday’s situation was Murphy’s Law and the perfect storm all rolled into one. And maybe it’s even a sign to big media, which lost some ad revenue on Sunday, that radio play-by-play teams should probably travel to road games.
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