Biz & IT

Hands on: NHL.com 2.0 goes top shelf with streaming video

Hoping to catch up with the other leagues, the NHL has launched the public …

Frank Caron – Sep 25, 2008 11:17 am | 0

As one of the two Canadians on staff here at Ars, I've watched sadly as American-centric professional sports leagues like the NFL evolved with significant advances to its online presence, while my dear NHL seemed stuck in the past. The league's dated NHL.com had some short and limited video clips, but the site has long been plagued with navigation problems and a distinctly dated look, and the Slingbox online video sharing service also left much to be desired, considering that the service was greatly handicapped for Canadians. Hoping to amend these problems and catch up with some of the other professional sports leagues, NHL.com is in the midst of a significant redesign, which is now in public beta.

In addition to a newly designed website, the launch of "NHL 2.0" brings with it some pretty substantial new services; the league has clearly been paying close attention to its siblings in other professional sports. The headlining new feature is NHL GameCenter Live, an integrated subscription service that offers nearly every single broadcast hockey game—up to nearly 40 in any given week—available live via "TV quality" streaming directly through NHL.com. A season's worth of streaming will cost you $169, with a $10 discount being offered until October 15. A free trial will be offered from October 10 to October 12.

The service's portal is surprisingly robust and may wind up being the leading model to follow when it launches next month. Using the integrated score displays in the header of the new site, players can instantly select to follow any active games through the GameCenter Live interface. Up to four different games can be streamed at once, displaying in a grid on the GameCenter screen. Certain games will have special "Inside the Glass" camera angles, as well. Lastly, the subscription gives users access to the full "REPLAY Game Archive" without blackouts, so avid fans can rewatch any of the games in the season-past again at their leisure.

The years-old design was dated and clunky.

Nonsubscribers and subscribers alike will also be able to use the GameCenter to view real-time game stats, the text-based play-by-play tracker, live text chat with other NHL fans, and streaming radio broadcasts of nightly games directly through the site. This means that on those cold winter nights, when the igloo is frosted over, we'll still be able to argue during the game over a bottle of Molson Canadian at the computer about whether Gordie Howe or Wayne Gretzky was the greatest player ever.

Accompanying the new GameCenter service is a full-featured fantasy hockey service. Yahoo! Sports and the league have teamed up to offer a brand-new fantasy hockey game directly through the new NHL.com. The free service is already up and running on the beta site, and both the NHL and Yahoo promise that it is a "premium" which boasts the first-ever use of actual game footage in a fantasy product. Various public and custom leagues are available for those who sign up for the site, which requires a Yahoo! login. Players can customize their teams with some visual choices before selecting players, making drafts, and partaking in all the staple fantasy hockey activities that will have you arguing in line at Tim Hortons the next morning.

And then, of course, there's the new website itself. A vastly more navigable landing area, the new front page of NHL.com is much cleaner than its predecessor; just a few top highlights are kept on the page, visually separated from the streams of live scores and ongoing games found in the page's header. The site itself has a heavy focus on visual aids, as there are plenty of videos and high-resolution pictures to please the eye.

The new design is sleeker and easier to navigate, bringing with it some great new features.

Much of the actual deep content, like the news articles and game pages, remain relatively the same in form, but some new additions stand out. Games accessible for the schedule now link directly to Ticketmaster, for example. The statistics section has also gotten some love in the form of matured organization and significant amounts of historical data made more easily accessible by the new design.

For real fans of hockey, such as myself, the GameCenter subscription alone is reason enough to get excited about the NHL.com redesign. Though many cable packages offer a modest level of access to the vast quantity of NHL games, the league has set up a robust service that will definitely be worth the money for anyone who must see every single game. This is especially true for Canadians, who typically pay a premium for broadcast NHL channels over our neighbors to the south—a travesty, considering the fact that hockey is our sport.

Admittedly, the lack of HD broadcasting may turn away some who are already subscribing to a broadcast HD hockey channel, but the sheer level of breadth in coverage is hard to match, and the exclusive features, like the special camera angles, could be enough of a tilting point in the favor of the new web service.

On the whole, it's good to see the NHL catch up with the times. The new site is a vast improvement over its dated predecessor, and some of the new features will greatly please hockey fans looking to get all the action from the rink from wherever they are. And, for me, this will be a great way to perpetuate my secret love for the Montreal Canadiens while living in Toronto. Sure, I may be sitting at the bar with a Leafs jersey, but I'll now be able to secretly stream the Canadiens' game to myself while the Leafs fans around me hold out hope for that next, never-coming Stanley Cup.

Frank Caron

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