Sports Rights: New NHL contract sets stage for wholesale sports channel fees to soar again

TORONTO – Given the pile of money Rogers Communications paid for the rights to the National Hockey League games for the next 12 years, look for the wholesale fees paid for sports by BDUs – and their customers – to shoot up.A research report recently published by Scotia Capital analyst Jeff Fan says that if you think sports makes up a big portion of BDUs’ programming costs now, just wait. When the sports genre was deregulated by the CRTC back in 2010, CTV/Bell Media served notice that rates for TSN (which had been the same for more than a decade)...