What's happening with ESPN+ and old NHL games being removed from the streaming service?

I reached out to ESPN to get a better explanation of what's happening.

There was a Tweet on Tuesday from Timothy Burke that drew some attention on social media.

ESPN has confirmed that it is now removing NHL games from on-demand ESPN+ after 30 days, officially making it a worse product than the one it replaced, NHL dot TV. It's no longer possible in any way to legally watch an NHL game that is more than a month old if you are in the US

A quick search of ESPN+ confirms that, as of right now, it’s impossible to find most older games.

I reached out ESPN directly to get an explainer of what happened.

According to an ESPN PR person, the report from Burke is only partially correct. The ESPN communications department rep I spoke with, who runs hockey-related PR for the network, also said they were unaware of who confirmed Burke’s report from ESPN.

According to ESPN communications, “A technical glitch was recently caught that had automatically defaulted to deleting games after 30 days.”

This, again according to ESPN, has been fixed and “for this season’s remaining games to be available on-demand on ESPN+ until Aug. 1 – similar as in year’s past.”

I guess we should explain a couple things.

For starters, ESPN+ deleting content roughly 30 days after airing is common practice. For many rights deals, ESPN has the right to air things live, but doesn’t have perpetuity access to the content.

In the NHL-ESPN+ deal, the network has access to re-air all games on demand during the course of the current season. They do not own the rights, beyond games that are ESPN exclusives, to do so beyond that.

This is why each year during the NHL-ESPN+ deal out-of-market on-demand games are effectively wiped away on Aug. 1.

This is one of the big differences between ESPN+ and the old NHL.tv out-of-market streaming service. NHL.tv was owned and operated by the league, it could be used as a de facto archive, since there wasn’t a third-party involved distributing the games.

The league, in theory, could launch its own archival service to watch games from past seasons. This used to be a feature on NHL.tv, but ESPN was never interested in streaming old games or being a historical resting place for game — the deal was always about current content.

ESPN+ doesn’t share streaming numbers, this is a Disney policy, but it’s well-believed that most fans weren’t impacted by this nor knew about it until Burke’s Tweet on Tuesday. Aside from hard-core fans and those who cover the sport for a living, hockey fans rarely go back to look up random games from October or November.

It’s frustrating as a hockey fan that likes to dig up old games — like myself — but beyond the technical glitch, ESPN was operating under the terms of the deal it has with the league when it comes to on-demand replays.

From an archival hockey perspective, this becomes more of a question — in my view — to the NHL, of how they plan to maintain recent history of the league so it’s readily available to the public, because ESPN+ isn’t, nor wasn’t, designed with that in mind.