Oct 11, 2026
For almost 75 years, Saturday night on CBC meant NHL games. On Oct. 3, the first Saturday of the new NHL season, Canada’s public broadcaster aired cricket instead.
The audience that tuned in was tiny. An estimated 27,000 viewers watched the men’s Canada Super60 match in overnight ratings, and the women’s final drew about 19,000. Meanwhile, Sportsnet’s NHL game in the same window drew roughly 1.45 million.
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On a ratings sheet, that’s a flop. But the decision behind it says a lot about who CBC wants to reach, why the biggest sports are moving behind paywalls and what Canadians will shell out in order to keep watching.
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Why did CBC put cricket in hockey’s old time slot?
CBC lost access to the NHL after Rogers Communications, which owns Sportsnet and holds national rights under a 12-year, $11-billion deal, didn’t renew the sub-license that let CBC air NHL games on Hockey Night in Canada. That deal is more than double Rogers’ previous $5.2-billion agreement.
As a result, the network filled the slot with CBC Sports Primetime, a weekly show that will rotate through sports including hockey, cricket, figure skating and curling. The show opened Saturday night with the Canada Super60, a professional T10 cricket league, live from BC Place in Vancouver.
CBC spokesperson Chuck Thompson told Juno News that the league was “a unique and rare opportunity for us to offer live, world-class cricket.”
“As a new Olympic sport, with a major event being held in Canada, the Super60 was a strong option for us to consider in our schedule as we bridge from summer to winter sports,” he added.
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Why would a network accept ratings that low?
Part of the answer is money. Veteran TV critic Bill Brioux says that CBC can now sell advertising in its Saturday primetime slot, since the network had been shut out of that revenue stream for more than a decade under its hockey arrangement with Rogers.
Then there are the Olympic Games. Cricket returns to the Games at LA28 after a 128-year hiatus, and CBC is Canada’s Olympic broadcaster. The network’s coverage of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games reached 30.5 million viewers in Canada, so building audiences for Olympic sports is central to its strategy.
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Demographics play a role, too. Many South Asian Canadians have roots in countries where cricket is the top sport. In 2021, they were the country’s largest racialized group, at nearly 2.6 million people or 7.1% of the population, according to Statistics Canada. The federal agency projects that group could reach 4.7 million to 6.5 million people by 2041.
What does this shift mean for your wallet?
The pattern is becoming clear: as major leagues command ever-bigger rights fees and viewers cover those costs through subscriptions, free TV will go to the sports broadcasters can still afford.
Watching every national NHL game now means paying two companies. Alongside Sportsnet, Prime Video holds exclusive Wednesday-night national games, which are available to Prime members at no extra cost.
CBC’s free lineup, on the other hand, is growing. Hockey Night in Canada returns Dec. 5 with the first of eight primetime Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) games, when the Montreal Victoire face PWHL Hamilton.
What to do now
Before you renew or add a sports subscription now that NHL games have left CBC’s ice:
- List the leagues and games you actually watched last season
- Check the live sports schedule on CBC Gem before paying for a new service
- Confirm whether someone in your household already pays for Amazon Prime
- If you only follow the regular season, opt for monthly billing and set a reminder to cancel
One quiet Saturday won’t decide whether cricket belongs in primetime. But it reveals the trade-off Canadians now face: pay up for the biggest leagues or follow the sports broadcasters can still offer for free. CBC is betting that if it airs these sports, viewers will come. As Chris Wilson, CBC’s executive director of sports and Olympics, points out, the PWHL partnership offers “free access to world-class hockey.”
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Leslie Kennedy served as an editor at Thomson Reuters and for Star Media Group, followed by a number of years as a writer and editor and content manager in marketing communications, before returning to her editorial roots. She is a graduate of Humber College’s post-graduate journalism program and has been a professional writer and editor ever since.
