A captive buyer: why Quebecor keeps paying for French NHL rights

In April 2025 the National Hockey League sold Rogers Communications, a Canadian telecom, the right to broadcast every game in the country for twelve years at a price of C$11bn (US$7.7bn) — more than double the previous contract. A monopoly provider had extracted a handsome rent. The revealing question is who ends up paying it, and the answer has just started to take shape. Quebecor, the Québec media and telecom group, has agreed to a new 12-year sublicensing deal to carry national NHL games in French on TVA Sports. That makes Quebecor, not the NHL or Rogers, the first identifiable payer of the bill.

Start with the arithmetic of the buyer. TVA Sports has lost more than C$197m in pretax earnings since it began airing NHL games in 2014; by 2024 it was paying C$73m a year for all Canadian programming rights. Its boss has said plainly that Quebecor lacked "the means or the business model" to pay the "exorbitant amount" the league demanded, and warned that "no one should be surprised if TVA Sports goes out of business." A reasonable reader might conclude the company would walk away. It has instead locked itself in for another twelve years, matching Rogers' term through 2037-38.

The instinct to see a contradiction is wrong. Renewal was the cheaper of two bad options. TVA Sports exists to stop Bell's rival French-language network, RDS, from owning hockey outright. Drop the national package and Quebecor hands its principal competitor the one sport that still drives subscriptions and advertising in Quebec — an own goal of the first order. This is the structure of a captive buyer: the decision is technically Quebecor's, but the alternative is to concede the market. Hockey's cost is the entrance fee for remaining a French-language sports broadcaster at all.

Rogers, for its part, has behaved like the middleman the C$11bn deal turned it into. It paid the NHL and now seeks to pass the risk downstream. Amazon has taken Wednesday-night national games, in both English and French, under its own 12-year sublicence; Quebecor takes the rest of the French national package. In the new carve-up the Montreal Canadiens' French-language games are split 45 to Bell's RDS, 32 to TVA Sports — ten more than before — and seven to Amazon, with TVA keeping exclusive right to the Canadiens' playoff games. Rogers prices its risk onto others, and what remains is the consumer.

The trouble is that the buyer's economics have not improved because the seller's price has not fallen. Quebecor can now point to a fortuitous cushion: a carriage-fee truce with Bell produced a one-time C$44m retroactive adjustment in its fourth-quarter earnings. Yet one-off relief is not an operating margin. The value of the new sublicence was not disclosed — a telling silence for a company that has lost money on hockey for over a decade — and the fan is the ultimate guarantor. Watching the Canadiens full-time increasingly means juggling RDS, TVA Sports and Amazon Prime, at prices that start with a C$17.99-a-month TVA add-on and climb into packages well past C$60.

Is paying again reasonable? For Quebecor's shareholders it is a defensible act of competitive defence, not a good investment. Hockey's rents now flow three ways: to the NHL in the headline price, to Rogers in the margin it keeps as middleman, and out of the pockets of Quebec fans who must subscribe to more services than ever. Quebecor's renewal converts an unavoidable competitive necessity into another decade of a broken linear-TV business, hoping that retention of the marquee playoff games — and Canadian fans' devotion — can yet close a gap that thirteen years of losses have failed to close. It is a bet that Quebec's affection for the sport exceeds the price of watching it. On that, the market will deliver its verdict one subscription at a time.