As Canadian hockey viewers brace for shift to streaming-only service, Prime Video hopes to woo them with Big Tech’s touch

Open this photo in gallery: Former NHL great Mark Messier will be among the on-air talent for Amazon's newly announced NHL broadcast.George Walker IV/The Associated Press

The National Hockey League is borrowing from the playbooks of Formula One and the National Football League, rolling out a documentary series and a weekly live highlights show as professional hockey moves to a streaming-only service in Canada for the first time next month.

Prime Video Canada unveiled its first season of NHL programming on Monday afternoon, which will include a weekly Monday night national game based in the home team’s arena instead of a central TV studio and will feature Hall of Famer Mark Messier among its rotating cast of analysts. Viewers who join games in progress will be offered the opportunity to catch up with a two-minute package of highlight clips put together by machine-learning technology that the Amazon-owned streamer is calling “Rapid Recap.”

“Our goal is to make [Monday night hockey] a huge national event,” said Jay Marine, vice-president and global head of Prime Video Sports, at a press event in downtown Toronto a stone’s throw from the Maple Leafs’ Scotiabank Arena.

Amazon bought the rights to the Monday games for the next two seasons from Rogers Communications Inc., which is entering the 11th year of a 12-year broadcast deal with the NHL. Rogers’s Sportsnet service will continue to carry national games on Wednesdays, as well as its Hockey Night in Canada doubleheader broadcast on Saturdays, which is seen on CBC, Sportsnet and other Rogers-owned channels.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail following the official presentation, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman framed the move to Prime as something of a learning opportunity for the league. “What I’m looking to do is create the most fan-friendly, widest distribution we can have,” he said, pointing out that the league’s next rights package will be coming up for sale later this season.

“This is a step in understanding the evolution of streaming, particularly for sports, doing it on a platform that is more widely based than cable or satellite combined, doing it at a time where the industry is evolving, and just prior to us hitting the marketplace.”

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In the United States, sports’ shift to streaming has spurred a backlash among fans and politicians. After the NFL sold one of its playoff games to NBC’s Peacock streaming service last season, as well as a playoff game for this season to Amazon, some members of the House of Representatives blasted the league, prompting Roger Goodell to promise that the Super Bowl would not move to streaming-only distribution for as long as he is NFL commissioner. Still, the league sold two Christmas Day games to Netflix for each of the next three seasons.

The NHL will be producing one of the new programs on Prime, a weekly Thursday edition of what is known as a whiparound show, with host Andi Petrillo in a New Jersey studio keeping viewers up to date on all of the action unfolding around the league, including live look-ins at games, highlights and interviews.

Ms. Petrillo, who recently served as a host of CBC’s Olympics coverage, noted the format for NHL Coast to Coast is tailor-made for the diminishing attention spans of sports fans.

“People are able to go to it and say, ‘Oh, maybe this was a game I wasn’t going to watch the entirety of, but now I’ve just checked in and saw the incredible goal. Or we just checked in for a power play and so-and-so just did this great move,’ ” she said. “We’re piping in during the key moments of the games and that’s in many ways where the consuming of content is going. Unless you’re a diehard fan of a certain team, you’re probably not going to sit there through the full 60 [minutes of a game]. But you will have some sort of interest in other games. This show now provides that for you.”

Ms. Petrillo will also co-host Prime Monday Night Hockey with Adnan Virk, sharing the screen with a team of analysts including Jody Shelley, Thomas Hickey, Shane Hnidy and Blake Bolden. John Forslund will call play-by-play.

Prime has also commissioned Faceoff: Inside the NHL from Box to Box Films, which produced Drive to Survive as well as Netflix’s tennis doc series Break Point and the golf show Full Swing. The six-part fly-on-the-wall series follows a handful of stars through last season’s NHL playoffs. The first episode, which was screened for press, featured the Toronto Maple Leafs star William Nylander walking his two dogs, playing shinny with neighbourhood kids, and watching his teammates on TV as he was dealing with the effects of a concussion, which sidelined him for the first three games of the Leafs-Bruins series last spring.

The show, which will drop all six episodes on Oct. 4, is shot and sound-tracked like a Marvel superhero epic, with swelling, propulsive music, slick editing and slow-motion moments of victory and defeat on the battlefield of play.

Stars featured in other episodes include Jack Eichel, Filip Forsberg, Jeremy Swayman, Leon Draisaitl, Connor McDavid, Zach Hyman and Matthew Tkachuk.

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