TORONTO – While the number of Canadians tuning into NHL hockey on television in Canada is down (despite Rogers public complaints about how ratings service Numeris is filling its viewership panels), Rogers Communications’ CEO and CFO say they’re pleased with the overall performance of the first half of the first season of the company’s 12-year, $5.2 billion rights deal.
“Actually, NHL’s doing very well for us, we’re very pleased with the execution of it thus far, and excited as we go through the rest of the reason. In fact, I spent yesterday in a planning meeting for next season. So, from my point of view, NHL is going well,” said CEO Guy Laurence in a conference call with reporters on Thursday after the company reported its Q4 results.
“From a financial perspective it’s bang-on to the expectations we had when we made the pitch for the deal and signed the it almost a year ago,” added Rogers CFO Tony Staffieri during the call. “So, we’re really pleased. In the fourth quarter alone, revenue came in at just under $100 million. We were expecting $100 million in our plans and we were within spitting distance of that.
“We’re really pleased on that front, and it’s underpinned by viewership. If you were to look at total eyeballs across everything that we put out there in terms of the NHL, depending on which things you look at, it’s up in the neighborhood of 10% to almost 15% year on year. And so, for something that, for us, was a fixed cost, it’s really translated into the monetization that we were looking for,” Staffieri added.
It’s still very early days in Rogers’ NHL deal and the company has consistently said it would measure success of the package not just with TV ratings, but with overall growth in things like subscriptions to Rogers Wireless and Sportsnet, as well as usage of its new hockey apps and the resulting data consumption, too.
That said, the TV viewership figures are certainly down from what it was last year (especially among Millennials, who are at least turning somewhat to digital and mobile) and the company has not issued any “ratings wins” press releases this season, meaning there has been little to publicly celebrate on the TV metrics.
A recent research report published exclusively by Cartt.ca today backs up that contention. Please click here to see that.
