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New Year's Day is all about football in the United States, which is why the NHL and NBC are taking a risk by programming the Winter Classic outdoor hockey game against the afternoon college bowls.
The Pittsburgh Penguins-Buffalo Sabres fresh-air game at Ralph Wilson Stadium will go head-to-head against the Gator Bowl on CBS, and, more important, the Capital One Bowl on ABC, with Michigan taking on Florida.
The problem for NBC is the majority of viewers in Michigan, a good hockey market, will be watching the Wolverines. And football will be the first option for TV audiences in most other markets.
Sam Flood, NBC's executive producer of hockey, says he's counting on, in addition to the sport's core audience, channel surfers stopping to check out the uniqueness of the outdoor spectacle and staying long enough to push up the Nielsen rating (the percentage of the potential viewing audience).
That New Year's Day is among the year's biggest viewing days in the United States should help NBC earn a respectable rating. It doesn't hurt that Penguins star Sidney Crosby is participating. And, by bringing in Bob Costas as host, NBC is clearly designating the telecast as a four-star production.
There's plenty on the line for the NHL. NBC has not committed to the 2008-09 season and the success of the outdoor game will help the network decide about continuing to televise hockey beyond this season.
"As we would with any property, we'll make an evaluation as the season goes along," NBC spokesman Brian Walker said. "We're hopeful the outdoor game and the new flex scheduling have a positive impact on ratings."
It would make sense for NBC to stay with the NHL in 2008-09 if only to get U.S. viewers more connected with hockey in advance of the network's coverage of the 2010 Olympic tournament in Vancouver.
What concerns NBC, however, is giving over as many as five prime-time spots in May and June to the Stanley Cup final when the ratings are minuscule. Last spring, NBC's rating of 1.1 for Game 3 of the Anaheim-Ottawa final matched its lowest prime-time rating in history, for a West Wing repeat in July, 2005.
But there may be options. The NHL is talking to ESPN about returning as a carrier in 2008-09 (on ESPN2). Versus, which owns U.S. cable exclusivity to the NHL, is agreeable to ESPN re-entering the market.
The TV schedule for the Stanley Cup final in 2009 could be structured in a way that relieves NBC of some of the prime-time burden. Versus could carry the first three games. ESPN would come in for the fourth and fifth, if necessary. If the series went six and seven games, they could go to NBC.
U.S. television audiences have been a disappointment for the NHL since it returned from the 2004-05 cancelled season, but it's difficult to place blame on the quality of the games or telecasts.
Hockey will always have a limited appeal outside the U.S. winter sports regions. And, postseason audience problems have largely been a function of small-market teams advancing, while teams from traditionally strong U.S. markets Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Detroit and Chicago either fell short of the Cup final or didn't qualify for the playoffs.
But NHL commissioner Gary Bettman should consider this a triumph, given the hard salary cap was intended to put the smaller teams on a par with those in the big markets.
A couple of high-tech cameras and a three-man booth are among the production enhancements that will be used by the CBC in its coverage of the Winter Classic.
Announcer Jim Hughson will team up with analysts Craig Simpson and Greg Millen to call the game. One of the new cameras will shoot pictures from an aircraft above the field and another will sit atop a seven-metre-high crane to give the audience a 360-degree view of the stadium.
Junior TV telecast
The lead play-by-play camera used by TSN for its world junior hockey championship coverage has an unusually high placement at the arena in Pardubice, Czech Republic. It sits almost above the ice surface.
A TSN crew member yesterday said the placement was dictated by the arena design. "What you lose with the lead camera, you gain with the down low camera," he said.
In yesterday's telecast of the Canada-Czech game TSN did not provide replays of the first two penalties. For the third, to Canadian Stefan Legein, the camera produced a good picture of a Czech player embellishing his fall, soccer style. "Completely fraudulent," analyst Pierre McGuire said.
- The Fan590 in Toronto is producing the Canadian games for radio at the tournament and syndicating them on 22 stations, plus XM Radio.
