CHL-wide streaming service coming soon

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All three CHL leagues will be housed under one streaming service this upcoming season. The Western Hockey League confirmed the news Wednesday in a press release.

"In partnership with the Canadian Hockey League (CHL), Ontario Hockey League (OHL), and Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL), the WHL is pleased to announce the development of a brand-new streaming service set to launch with the beginning of the 2020-21 regular season," read the release.

"WHL fans can look forward to all three CHL leagues housed under one streaming service, with a new digital platform developed by an entirely new partner available on new devices. Further details including the new streaming service provider, pricing and packaging, will be announced at a later date."

CHL president Dan MacKenzie hinted at this news earlier this year in an interview with The Hockey News.

“We’ll have a new broadcast partner for next season," MacKenzie said in the magazine's Future Watch edition. "We want to improve the quality of our live streaming game, offering more focus on the consistency of the broadcast product in all 60 arenas."

CHL streams have been notoriously bad for years, particularly in the QMJHL and WHL where the majority of games are not shown on local cable stations. Obviously, the hope is that the streaming quality improves, ideally with replays and a scoreboard of some sort. Multiple league sources have told us the new provider will have minimum quality standards that are already higher than many of the current streams.

The other major problem has been cost, again, particularly in the QMJHL and WHL where there aren't many TV broadcast options. Current webcast subscription prices are comparable to NHL streams - but with the quality far worse.

The QMJHL has been with the streaming service Neulion since the 2014-15 season. The video quality was a drastic improvement over the old Telus broadcasts but there were still some odd issues - the strangest being the setup for when games were broadcast by Rogers TV, Sportsnet or TVA Sports, which didn't allow users to listen to their team's audio broadcasts, which often times meant listening in a language you may not understand. This is a unique QMJHL issue that hopefully gets addressed.

 In 2018, the American Hockey League switched webcasts provider to Hockey Tech, which offered users noticeably cheaper packages.

The QMJHL typically releases webcast information just a few days prior to the start of the regular season. Hopefully we get some further information on what's ahead sooner than that.