One day after I rant about the debacle involving the NHL rights in Europe, the league has finally made NHL Gamecenter Live available to fans across to pond. Coincidence? Probably but that’s not the point. Waiting this long to officially announce it was bad PR. You can sign up for it here but there still isn’t much information when it comes to blackouts and such.
While this is good news, it is still unknown where the Euro TV rights are headed. Without any deals signed for that, the entire AMI/Medge partnership is off to a very rough start for the league. At this point it doesn’t appear that AMI/Medge has made many gains for the league as GCL is an in house product. Unless ESPN was demanding continued use of ESPN Player, it is hard to say how AMI/Medge has brought anything new to the table at this point. Hopefully that will change over time.
The Paranoid Puck 
ikkeson
September 29, 2011 at 7:42 pm
As a Belgian Canucks fan, it is sad to hear nothing from either parties involved in this negotiations. GCL is not an option, as with most Belgian internet subscriptions there is a monthly maximum of data. With the costs of a subscription to GCL and only the opportunity to watch 1 game, maybe 2, considering the amount of data used during a live game, following the NHL season would be a disaster.
paranoidpuck
September 30, 2011 at 4:27 pm
That’s a very good point and one that most people including myself didn’t think about. The bottom line is that the NHL needs to be on TV. Online coverage alone isn’t going to cut it.
onebuttonmonkey
October 2, 2011 at 8:28 pm
When I followed this, the FAQs for the GCL page you link still say that you need to use ESPN player if you’re in Europe (a ‘this service is not available’ page is all you get from the FAQ’s link to ESPN), and if you read the T&Cs they still exclude Europe from GCL coverage. So as a UK-based Canucks fan I still can’t guarantee the service will work…
paranoidpuck
October 2, 2011 at 9:53 pm
It should work. NHL.com has failed to update their FAQ or TOS pages. Those pages are from last season. Markukleaf has created his own Europe GCL FAQ page until the league finally updates it.
http://markukleaf.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/nhl-gcl-has-arrived/
jan
October 10, 2013 at 1:35 pm
if i try to sign up for GCL i get redirected to NHL Vault, which is not what want. How do you sign up for GCL?