Tampa Bay Lightning’s Stanley Cup win not necessarily one for NBC

Lightning’s Stanley Cup Final win is the finale for NBC NBC closed out its sixteen-year run with the NHL with modest ratings for the Stanley Cup Final series between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Montreal Canadiens, who made their first Final appearance since 1993. According to Sports Media Watch and Nielsen, the entire five-game series drew an average of […]

No Blues for NHL as Game 7 sets Stanley Cup ratings benchmark

St. Louis boring? Not when their team just won the Stanley Cup.  Who needs the Chicago Blackhawks? That’s the sentiment NBC Sports and the NHL are having Thursday in the light of record-setting ratings between teams in the 10th and 21st-largest television markets. The St. Louis Blues clinched its first-ever Stanley Cup championship (much to the chagrin of some Blackhawks […]

NHL strikes blockbuster Canadian rights deal with Rogers

Rogers to sublicense games to CBC; TVA gets exclusive French-language rights; Bell Media’s TSN shut out In one of the biggest TV deals in North American history, Canadian cable giant Rogers Communications – which was founded as a vacuum tube company in 1925 and pioneered FM Broadcasting in Canada in the 1960s, reached a 12-year, $5.25 billion pact with the […]

Lakers sign mega deal with Time Warner Cable

The NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers signed a new superstar Monday to a 20 year deal – and it’s not an athlete. The “star” is Time Warner Cable, who announced Monday it has signed a 20-year deal with the Lakers to broadcast all non-national televised games on not one, but two regional sports networks it is planning for 2012. The first […]

Football Championship Sunday draws big

Blackhawks a big draw in Canada over the weekend Even though three of the four teams who participated in last Sunday’s NFL Conference Championship games came from smaller markets, the ratings were certainly big enough. The NFC Championship Game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints drew a whopping 58 million viewers, the most for a NFC Championship […]

Playoff season: That’s a wrap!

Finally tallies of the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Finals: – The five game series between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Orlando Magic drew 14.3 million viewers for ABC, down 4 percent from last year’s Lakers-Celtics series. Game 5 drew fewer viewers than Game 4 did, with only 14.2 million viewers tuning in. – Among ratings, it is […]