Houston: Viewer numbers give the NHL reason to worry

Houston: Viewer numbers give the NHL reason to worry
WILLIAM HOUSTON Globe and Mail Update

The National Hockey League season is past the halfway point, but television is still back at the starting gate looking for an audience.

NBC's first telecast of the season earned a 1.1 rating (percentage of U.S. households tuned in), a drop of 20 per cent from the opener a year ago.
U.S. regional audiences are down by about 25 per cent. National viewership on Versus, the U.S. cable channel, is up 3 per cent. But the average audience of 195,476 on Versus is about half of what ESPN2 used to pull in.

For the CBC, the numbers tell two stories: one grim, the other worrisome.
The Hockey Night in Canada audience for the first game of its telecast (1.285 million) has dropped 12 per cent from last year. For the second game (723,000), the decrease is 30 per cent.