The "NBC Effect"

It’s long been a running assumption that hockey broadcasters in Canada don’t like having to accommodate U.S. network television with weekend afternoon games in the playoffs – particularly at the expense of the traditional Saturday night timeslot. The numbers through the first two rounds of this year’s playoffs would seem to support this assumption. The below table looks at how each of NBC’s six afternoon games this post-season has performed on Canadian television in comparison with the rest of the respective series:

When the “NBC Effect” is negative, as shown in red, it means that less people were watching the game on CBC or TSN than was the case for the rest of the series. As you can see, there is a lot of red in the table. In fact, of the six broadcasts, five were negative (three significantly so) and only one managed to barely eek out a positive impact of 0.3%. These numbers show that, on average, Canadian broadcasters lose about 15% of their audiences when a game is played on a weekend afternoon. Conversely, the below table shows a sharp increase in viewers when a game is played on a Saturday night:

When the “Saturday Night Effect” is positive, as shown in green, it means that more people were watching the game on CBC or TSN than was the case for the rest of the series. As you can see, there is only green in the table. According to this data, Canadian broadcasters can expect to benefit from double-digit audience growth for Saturday night telecasts. Coupled with the loss from afternoon broadcasts, we can conclude that there is a significant swing when Saturday games are moved around by a few hours.

It looks as if CBC and TSN have an empirical reason to complain when they are asked (read: forced) to accommodate their U.S. broadcasting partner.

TONIGHT'S GAMES:
No games scheduled