24/7 audio network Ducks Stream has been a boom creatively and financially for Anaheim Ducks

Other NHL teams are taking notice of what's happening in Anaheim on a broadcasting front.

Ryan Getzlaf and Alexis Downie (all photos courtesy of Ducks Stream).

Back in March, it was a couple days before the NHL trade deadline, I was talking to an NHL team executive about the state of hockey radio coverage in the United States.

We were talking about how for many NHL teams radio has become a losing proposition. Both when it comes to quality of coverage and financially speaking.

The radio landscape is still reflective of the NHL’s standing as the fourth largest league in America. NFL, NBA, and MLB all dominate conversation before the NHL. And in many markets, the NFL doesn’t even give enough space for the NBA or MLB to breathe.

In most NHL cities, to hear NHL talk on the radio in the United States, you typically need to have a satellite radio subscription or be lucky enough to that you caught one of the few segments dedicated to the sport.

Financially speaking most NHL teams also pay to have their games on the radio.

Not only are teams rarely getting coverage from local stations, but they also are paying those respective stations at the same time. It’s a point of frustration for many NHL team executives, which is why many teams in recent years have completely left terrestrial radio.

The executive I was talking to in March still has his team on terrestrial radio, but was heavily considering making a move this summer to a digital-only approach when the rights deal — which they pay for — expires with a local station.

They said I should look at what the Anaheim Ducks have done the past two seasons with Ducks Stream, a 24/7 audio streaming network that the team launched in October of 2022.

So I did.

And while the product launched for the 2022-23 season, it’s really grown and expanded into a standard bearer other NHL teams are taking note of during the 2023-24 season.

For starters, Ducks broadcasts this season saw an 18.18 percent increase in listenership this season. That’s happened, it should be noted, in a year the Ducks are not a successful hockey team on the ice and had the third-worst record in the league.

There have been more than 500,000 total downloads and listens to the Ducks Stream station, while there have been 515 podcasts created in the two year span for more than 300 hours of on-demand content.

Ducks Stream has also cut to heart of one of the biggest problems teams in the United States currently face: when news happens, where do fans go and know they’ll have live coverage breaking it all down?

When Anaheim traded for Cutter Gauthier in January, Ducks Stream had one of it’s marquee moments, serving as the one of the only outlets fans of the Ducks (and the Flyers) could hear from both the GM who pulled the trigger on the trade and the player himself.

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Joey Liberatore is the Ducks’ senior manager of broadcasting and was brought in to effectively launch the Ducks Stream in 2022 after helping build a similar product for the Oakland Athletics, known as A’s Cast.

Liberatore is passionate about the product, you can hear it in his voice.

Liberatore’s dad was a truck driver, spending long hours and days away from the family. So for father and son, sports were the connector.

“I didn’t get to see my dad a whole lot, he was always on the road,” Liberatore said. “So I would actually watch games of hockey and baseball, and I would give my dad play-by-play on the phone. And that’s how my dad and I got really close. Sometimes I would just listen to the broadcasts and just tell my dad what they said. It was something that connected us even though he was away so much.

“Sports can bring families closer, so I essentially wanted to create that,” Liberatore added. “I think about it that way, where I wanted to create something where a kid can go home and tell mom or dad about what they heard on Ducks Stream.”

To make those connections, the Ducks had to figure out how to best serve their audience. Liberatore said it was all about attempting to connect large swaths of the fan base, while also being a touch point for new fans to engage and learn about the team and sport.

Alexis Downie was hired as a full-time host and content producer for Ducks Stream, and Liberatore credits her with building a “young and dynamic voice,” that relates well with players and draws out more personality.

As the product grew, the Ducks hired former NHL forward Emerson Etem in a full-time role for the platform. In addition to working on the audio broadcasts of games, Etem hosts his own show which gets further into the Xs and Os of the sport.

“I think they’ve done a great job speaking to each generation of our fans,” Liberatore said. “If you want to get really deep into why or how something happened on the ice, we have that. But it’s done in a way that isn’t making it too hard for a new fan to learn. And I really want to always remember that new fan, the one being created now. Because that point of connectivity with players, human conversation, is how you grow this product in my mind.”

For example, the Player’s Lounge, a show focused on player personalities, has a 70 percent female listenership according to Liberatore. The show has also done really well with the female 18-to-22 year-old demographic.

“And that’s a really hard demographic to hit, especially in hockey,” Liberatore said. “So the vision has been more about finding ways to connect and re-center hockey to every potential Ducks fan, no matter what their demographic is.”

Much of this is data driven, too.

Through Ducks Stream the team is able to capture audience metrics for both demographics and location. The team can tell when and where fans start and stop listening, and it’s allowed Liberatore and his team to tweak and try different approaches to shows.

For example, during the 2022-23 season, the team experimented with a call-in show after games. This season the Ducks moved to a text line, which has led to more fan interaction and growth.

“And we can be as creative as we want with it,” Liberatore said. “With streaming with the data we can get honest and candid feedback, sometimes we need to expand something more. Sometimes we need to shrink things, and the great thing is we have the space to try all of this without having to fit into a radio block.”

Liberatore is also fortunate that Ducks’ hockey operations aren’t standing in the way.

A lot of times, one of the biggest roadblocks that comes with potential content creation are the head coaches and general managers.

Hockey teams are cagey about information, more so than in other sports — just look at the lower-body/upper-body injury designations — and some GMs tend to put more roadblocks when it comes to being able to tell the human story of the game.

I know, for example, in my line of work there have been times I’ve reached out to try and tell the story of an assistant coach or staffer who is vital to the team. For some teams, any idea of even letting that person talk is squashed because the GM wants full control of everything.

Letting players riff live on a microphone for a 24/7 audio network while on the road, like the Ducks allow?

That’s not going to fly for certain GMs and coaches in this league.

But Ducks GM Pat Verbeek and head coach Greg Cronin get it, they don’t put blocks on PR from allowing fun, human stories. More importantly, both are willing to be part of the product, and Verbeek is regularly on Ducks Cast talking directly to fans about the direction of the team and sometimes explaining why or how moves are made.

Ducks GM Pat Vebreek joins Ducks Stream.

“This almost impossible to do without their buy-in,” Liberatore said.

It creates a smarter, more connected hockey fan. And this is all happening why the team is still rebuilding on the ice.

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It’s important to remember that as great as content freedom is, it has to work as business model.

And the early business success of Ducks Stream, coming from a place that used to be loss-leader for teams — paying to be on radio — is why other NHL teams have been heavily looking at what the Ducks are doing.

The stream has tripled its number of sponsors from season to season according to Liberatore. With the targeted demographics and data from streaming, sponsors and brands have also come to the Ducks for a more direct approach for their intended audience.

“At the end of the day we live in a business world,” Liberatore said. “And fortunately this has supported the business very well. We’ve had tangible proof that this isn’t just a cool thing we are doing, it’s actually growing the brand and helping the business.”

And again, this is while the team is not very good.

Just imagine what Ducks Stream could look like as the rebuild progresses.

“That’s very exciting, I just looked at our data the other day and our download data outside of game broadcasts increased 40 percent year over year,” Liberatore said. “So fans are finding ways to engage with the team, even if the game itself isn’t moving them right now … I think earlier in the year, we had a stretch where the team went on a winning steak and our data gave us a truer sense of what we can see in the future. So we’ve had moments where we get a glimpse of the future, and how well this thing can do when an exciting team on the ice starts to become more of a winning team and the rebuild takes next steps.”