Did you wonder what happened to Hockey Night in Canada on the NHL Network this past weekend?
Don't worry; you didn't miss a thing, for once. There was no CBC Hockey Night in Canada due to the Christmas holiday. In fact, the NHL went dark on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Last year, the NHL Network blew off the HNIC doubleheader to show juniors hockey. This year, there was no interruption due to the holiday.
But this does give us time to reflect on where the NHL Network coverage has been so far this year, and where it is going.
Still wish the network would simply run the late game as it happens, especially because the network runs the scores from the previous night while you are watching the rebroadcast.
Though this doesn't happen too often, there is one good trick for watching the rebroadcast of the late game of the Saturday doubleheader of Hockey Night in Canada on the NHL Network.
One of the annoying habits of the NHL Network's stubbornness in not carrying the second game live is that they run the previous night's scores while you are watching the game. So learning which team won the game is way too easy.
I have discovered that on the weeks where the NHL Network runs the rebroadcast twice, on the second run, the scores aren't repeated. So even if you are stuck with the huge bar below, and the ever-annoying pop-up ads that literally block the action, at least you won't learn which team won until you get to the end of the game.
That won't happen next weekend, as the rebroadcast is scheduled for 7 am Eastern. But keep that tip in mind.
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Canadians run into problems with getting U.S. feeds because of sim subs, which means that Canadian commercial breaks run over U.S. programming if the program is aired simultaneously on a Canadian channel. We got a bad sample of this during the After Hours rebroadcast last week.
After the next-to-last segment, the NHL Network went to commercial and never came back. So we didn't get to see the final segment of After Hours. After a rather long commercial break, we were magically into the next program.
Accidents can happen sometimes in live programming, but this wasn't live. This was the second rebroadcast airing of the day.
And we somehow didn't get an interview after the second period from the Dec. 18 live broadcast of the Toronto at Vancouver contest. There is an interview with a player after each period before the studio segment, but in the United States, we never saw it.
Now these could be mistakes from the CBC, but the suspicion is that someone on the U.S. side wasn't paying attention.
NHL Network officials, please provide more caffeine to the person or people responsible for making sure we get the whole CBC feed.
This would be easier if a cable system offered a pure CBC feed.
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