Sportsnet Lifted 150 NHL Blackouts This Season. It Also Built a Paywall.
Monday Night Hockey returns tonight, Oct. 5, with Ottawa at Boston and Winnipeg at Pittsburgh. For a lot of Canadian fans with a full cable package that includes Sportsnet, neither game will be on their TV. This season, Monday Night Hockey streams only on Sportsnet+.
It is the clearest sign of how “where can I watch the game?” has changed in Canada this season. 2026-27 is the first year of Rogers’ 12-year, C$11 billion national NHL deal, and it moves in two directions at once. Geography matters less than it used to. Subscriptions matter more.
Fewer blackouts
Canada has always had its own version of the blackout. Each Canadian team has a regional territory, and regional games are only shown inside it. A Canucks regional game is for British Columbia and the Yukon, not for Toronto.
This season Sportsnet says it has lifted 150 regional blackouts, taking games it already held regional rights to and showing them nationally, as part of more than 550 national games and 35 percent more national broadcasts than last season. The deal allows Rogers to convert all regional games for the Canucks, Flames and Oilers, half of the Maple Leafs’ and a few Jets and Senators games.
For a fan in Halifax who follows the Oilers, that is a real improvement. More of the season is national, so where you live matters less.
The regional layer has not disappeared, though. TSN’s regional deals with the Leafs, Senators, Canadiens and Jets are separate club contracts, and they still black out outside each team’s territory. Sportsnet has not published a list of the 150 converted games.
More paywalls
At the same time, the national package has been split across more platforms, and not all of them come with a TV subscription.
- Saturday Night Hockey on Sportsnet replaces Hockey Night in Canada. CBC, which carried the NHL for about 74 years, is no longer part of the coverage. Its last game was the 2026 Stanley Cup Final.
- Monday Night Hockey streams exclusively on Sportsnet+: 53 games over 27 Mondays, every one involving a Canadian team.
- Wednesday Night Hockey is exclusive to Prime Video, which has 27 games in English and, for the first time, in French.
- French national games sit with TVA Sports, up to 350 a season, including 32 Canadiens games.
The Monday split hits some fans harder than others. Counted from the published schedule, the Maple Leafs play 13 of the 53 Monday games, more than any other team. The Jets, Oilers and Canucks play nine each, the Flames eight, the Senators seven and the Canadiens six. For Leafs fans, the first paywalled game is Oct. 19 against San Jose.
Same channel, different entitlement
This is where “it’s on Sportsnet” stops being a complete answer.
A cable or IPTV customer who already pays for Sportsnet does not automatically get the Monday games. To watch them, most subscribers pay a C$12.99 monthly add-on to unlock the Sportsnet+ exclusives. Whether that fee applies depends on who supplies the TV package, not on what is in it. Rogers Xfinity TV customers whose package includes Sportsnet get the Monday games at no extra cost. As of Sept. 30, Rogers said it was “working with cable and other TV providers,” but we found no agreement with any other provider, so subscribers with Bell, Telus, Cogeco, Vidéotron and others pay.
In French it splits differently again. TVA Sports carries all six Canadiens Monday games, so a French-language Habs fan with TVA does not need the Sportsnet+ add-on for those nights.
So the same game, on the same brand, can be:
- included, for a Rogers TV customer with Sportsnet
- a C$12.99 add-on, for a Bell or Telus customer with the same channel
- part of a direct Sportsnet+ subscription, for a cord-cutter
- on TVA Sports instead, for a French-language Canadiens viewer
None of those differences show up in the channel name. They depend on the viewer’s provider, plan and language.
A Leafs season, five doors
Put it together for one team. A Toronto fan following every game this season needs to know about five different routes:
| Where | What it is | What the fan needs |
| TSN4 | Regional games, Ontario outside the Ottawa region | TSN, on TV or streaming |
| Sportsnet Ontario | Regional games under the Bell and Rogers split | Sportsnet, regional feed |
| Sportsnet (national) | Saturday Night Hockey and other national games | Sportsnet, on TV or streaming |
| Sportsnet+ | 13 Monday Night Hockey games | Sportsnet+, or the C$12.99 add-on, unless on Rogers TV |
| Prime Video | 6 Wednesday Night Hockey games | A Prime membership |
That makes three separate services for a cord-cutter who wants the full season: Sportsnet+, TSN and Prime Video. The NHL’s deputy commissioner, Bill Daly, summed up the league’s view to The Canadian Press: “The nostalgic side of me says that’s unfortunate. But the reality side of me says that’s the nature of the world.”
What this means for “where to watch” data
For years, the hard part of Canadian hockey data was territory: which region is this game shown in? This season the harder part is entitlement: which platform, which tier, which provider and which language?
That changes the lookup key. It is no longer enough to store (game, region, channel). The answer now depends on (game, region, platform, tier), and for a growing share of games the platform is a stream that a TV package does not include.
A fixture list will tell you that Ottawa plays in Boston tonight at 7:30 p.m. Eastern. It will not tell you that a Senators fan with the same Sportsnet channel as their neighbor may or may not be able to watch it, depending on which company sends them their TV bill.
This piece follows part 2 of our US Blackout Series, which covered how the NHL’s local TV map was rebuilt south of the border.
If your platform needs to answer “where can I watch this” for Canadian fans, game by game and provider by provider, that is the dataset we maintain. Get in touch.