Over the past few years, the NHL has been making a big deal out of its slogan declaring that Hockey is for Everyone, but it wasn’t until last weekend that I realized they meant bears, too. A little more than halfway through the second period of the Bruins-Penguins game on Saturday afternoon, an actual bruin – or, at least, an animated one – unloaded a slap shot that deflected past the goalie and into the net.
The moment took place during an alternate version of the game set in the world of Big City Greens, an animated Disney Channel show about a family from the sticks that moves to the big city. Produced in part by ESPN, the game was animated live, in real time, using the NHL’s new puck-and-player tracking technology.
As a lark, when the Penguins were on the power play, their avatars were replaced by animated penguins; during Bruin power plays, their on-ice squad was replaced by bears. The game aired on Disney Channel in the United States and on the Disney+ streaming service in a handful of countries, including Canada.
Alterna-casts, as they’re known, are one of the biggest trends in sports media, as broadcasters and leagues try to get out in front of the fragmentation of their traditional audiences by offering as many ways as possible for fans to engage with their content.
Or, rather, many broadcasters are trying it. Just not in Canada.
Three years ago, ESPN launched the ManningCast, where viewers could hang with Peyton and Eli Manning as they kibbitz while watching an NFL game together from studios in Los Angeles and Denver. NBC Sports jumped into the business of betcasts, airing NBA, NHL, and MLB matches that feature live odds onscreen and betting analysts in studio, with the games themselves relegated to a corner of the picture. Other networks are offering MLB games featuring retired players chatting casually through broadcasts, with no traditional play-by-play at all.
Broadcasters speak openly about these ventures as experiments. They admit they don’t really know what’s going to work (other than the ManningCast, which was a hit right out of the gate), and they keep refining the programs, sometimes from one week to the next.
Even so, the alterna-cast trend is gaining steam. Last week Warner Bros. Discovery announced that as part of an overhaul of one of its moribund networks, TruTV, it would program the channel with alternative broadcasts, in hopes of attracting younger audiences that aren’t watching the traditional broadcasts of the NHL, MLB and NBA games on its TNT and TBS channels.
Experimentation used to be in the DNA of Canadian broadcasters. The near-instant-replay was invented by a Hockey Night in Canada producer at CBC in 1955. But Canadian networks no longer seem to have much of a stomach for risks, and they’re sitting out the alterna-cast movement.
You can understand the hesitation. Broadcasters up here can’t capitalize on the same kind of audience scale that their U.S. counterparts have. They’ve run the numbers, and the numbers don’t make sense right now, which is the only timeframe their bosses care about in the current environment.
But a glance at Big City Greens Classic 2 (the first edition was last year, between the Rangers and the Capitals) gives a sense of the huge opportunity they’re missing. The broadcast began with a cute video of Sidney Crosby and Brad Marchand taking phone calls from two of the Big City Greens characters; the skit actually managed to make Marchand almost cuddly. Another pregame bit featured an interview with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who was also animated – and therefore, also kind of endearing.
For new fans, there were brief segments that explained some of the game’s fundamentals, including the evolution of the modern puck and the way the rink is divided into defensive, neutral, and offensive zones.
Like the players, the on-air team of Kevin Weekes, Drew Carter and Arda Ocal were animated live, in real time. The referees were replaced by animated chickens. When goals were scored, the net jumped off its moorings and a glittery disco ball appeared over the rink in celebration. At one point, Weekes was dropped into a replay of a goal and, with the action frozen, Matrix-style, he explained how the play developed, and pointed out where there was a nice fat gap above the goalie’s glove hand.
Kids are an important market for alterna-casts, because broadcasters and leagues are so concerned about the next generation not developing their parents’ habit of watching games on TV.
Last month, during CBS’s broadcast of the Super Bowl, its corporate sister Nickelodeon aired an alternate version of the game featuring characters from SpongeBob SquarePants. Larry the Lobster dropped onto the field at one point before a play, the game analysts peppered their chatter with kid-friendly explanations of the red zone and other football terms, and touchdowns were celebrated by drenching the end zone with the network’s signature (animated) slime. It was, to be honest, pretty entertaining.
These are expensive programs to produce, but most alternate broadcasts aren’t such heavy lifts. Still, if Canadian networks can’t make the economics work, something is going to have to change.
Maybe the leagues will need to cut the fees they charge for media rights. There’s no point in the NHL squeezing out every last dollar if it means broadcasters can’t invest in attracting new audiences for their games. Because otherwise, not too long from now, they may find that, in fact, hockey is for no one.
Simon Houpt