A NHL on TNT blackout graphic. (Jeff Agrest on X.)
By Andrew Bucholtz on

An oft-thorny issue with national broadcasts is when they’re blacked out locally in favor of a team’s local broadcast. This takes on extra dimensions when there’s a significant carriage dispute or lack of carriage for the network carrying the local broadcasts. And this happened in a particularly strange way with the Boston Bruins-Chicago Blackhawks game Wednesday night.

That game was being nationally broadcast on TNT. But there was conflicting information this week on whether that national feed would be blacked out in Chicago to promote the new Chicago Sports Network local feed, significant considering CSN’s carriage issues. Those blackouts are determined by the league, but it wasn’t clear if there would or would not be one here.

Update: Awful Announcing learned Thursday that the league provided notice that there wouldn’t be a blackout Wednesday, much later than usual. That likely meant the blackout wasn’t lifted across all providers in time. Our original post continues below.

Jeff Agrest of The Chicago Sun-Times wrote Wednesday night that programming schedules indicated no blackout Monday, TNT indicated a blackout Tuesday, the team said no blackout Wednesday, and then the game went from shown to blacked out on TNT on at least some providers partway through:

However, the social media conversation in response to Agrest and others indicates that while this was prevalent across several providers (and even started before the game on some providers), it’s not universal:

There are any number of things that could be at play here. Blacking out national feeds in favor of local ones can be a complicated process, one often differing at least slightly by providers (which explains some of the responses above). And it’s not immune to technical glitches; in 2020, we notably saw some Los Angeles Lakers games on ESPN blacked out in the Bay Area, outside their local broadcast territory, due to a zip code database error.

But this particular local blackout comes with some specific issues thanks to the newly-launched and only-partly-carried status of Chicago Sports Network. That network was officially announced in June (following a lot of rumors and reporting), then officially launched in October (albeit with some technical glitches). But its carriage is far from widespread; while CSN had deals with several providers at launch, added Fubo afterwards, and added a direct-to-consumer streaming option last month, they particularly still don’t have a deal with Comcast (No. 2 nationally amongst MVPD subscribers behind only Charter, with 12.8 million estimated as of Q3 this year, and particularly big in Chicago) despite even offering a reduction in per-subscriber fee, and still don’t have deals with some other providers. So there’s certainly a notable group of people who could watch this when it was on TNT and not blacked out, and the sudden blackout was a negative for them.

[Jeff Agrest on X]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz