Overview

This report uses Nielsen television ratings to assess the benefit of the sale of broadcasting rights for hockey games.  Major findings:

• CBC, TSN and CTV combine to broadcast each of the Leafs’ regular-season games.
• CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada draws the largest audiences, often more than 1 million viewers; TSN, however, broadcasts a greater percentage of the games.
• Networks benefit from high ratings by commanding higher sponsorship and advertising fees and using increased the traffic on their channels to attract viewers to other programs.
• Hockey teams benefit from high ratings because larger potential audiences increase the value of the broadcast rights, and hence the revenue to teams when the rights are sold.
• Sponsors and advertisers benefit by the increased publicity that accompanies larger audiences for their commercials.

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