Judging by the comments online, this might have been a bigger story this NLL offseason than the Wings and Black Bears folding. At least with those stories, we all saw them coming. Not this one.

The NLL announced on Thursday that they had agreed to a partnership with a company called FloSports for exclusive streaming rights to all NLL games, both regular season and playoffs. That’s right, NLL+, the league’s own broadcast and streaming service, is no more. Considering how much time and work (and presumably money) the league put into NLL+, this was surprising to me.

The reaction from many fans to the news of this partnership was… less than enthusiastic. There were complaints about the broadcast quality but mostly there were complaints about the fact that watching NLL games this season would no longer be free.

I reached out to the league’s Executive VP of Broadcast and Media Joel Feld and the Senior VP of Technology and Broadcast Operations Ed Derse to ask about the reasoning behind this decision. After I talked to Joel and Ed, they (virtually) introduced me to Brian Reinert, VP of Corporate Communications at FloSports, and I had a conversation with him as well. This is a summary of those conversations.

The deal

I had never heard of FloSports (well, actually I had, but more on that later), so I was a bit skeptical as well. FloSports has been interested in the NLL for a number of years, and were actually in conversation with the league the last time the streaming rights were being negotiated (when the league went with ESPN+). FloSports already broadcasts some college lacrosse, the MSL, the Arena Lacrosse League (ALL), and the Mann Cup as well, so they decided the NLL was the next logical step. They’ve worked with commissioner Brett Frood in the past, and came to the NLL with an offer of a partnership. Joel actually referred to the deal as a “no-brainer” for the NLL, so they were pretty excited about it. The deal included the fact that FloSports would have exclusive streaming rights for all NLL games, so that took NLL+ and ESPN+ out of the equation. As proud as Joel and Ed are of NLL+, they realized that this deal would be better for the NLL going forward.

A huge plus for the NLL is that FloSports is creating a new channel, FloLacrosse, which will include much of their existing lacrosse content, and they’re adding a lot more. FloLacrosse will be available outside of the FloSports paywall; specifically, it will be available to everyone with an Amazon Prime subscription (in the US) as well as on YouTube. If you have an LG smart TV, there’s a FloSports channel there as well. There will be a game of the week (called the Saturday Showcase) broadcast on FloLacrosse, which means that everyone with Amazon Prime will be able to see an NLL game every Saturday night for no extra cost.

For context, at least there are at least 180 million people in the US with Amazon Prime memberships. Put another way, over 80% of US households have access to Amazon Prime Video. The Saturday Showcase will only be shown on Amazon Prime in the US, not in Canada, where the TSN deal (featuring games on linear TV) will continue. But the FloSports YouTube channel (which will show the Saturday Showcase) is free to everyone on the internet, which is most of the world.

In addition, full-game replays of every game will be available on the league’s YouTube channel 24 hours after the end of the game.

Quality

Something to consider is that the NLL will still be responsible for producing the broadcasts, so the quality will be the same as we’ve seen for the past five years. Nothing about the game broadcast – the video quality, the broadcasters, the on-screen graphics, etc. – will be changing because of this deal. For the games, FloSports is merely the streaming provider.

Also note that FloSports is the streaming provider for a ton of other leagues and sports, but they don’t do most of the video production. If FloSports has a low-quality video feed provided to them, that’s what they have to stream.

FloSports does have the “MultiView” capability that NLL+ had, so you will be able to watch multiple games at the same time, but it will be limited to two games at once – initially, anyway. That may change later.

Additional Content

However, FloSports will also be producing its own NLL content. Brian was very excited about this part – they are hiring people familiar with the sport and the league to produce highlight shows, news, editorials, rankings, interviews, and other NLL content. All of this will be on their FloLacrosse channel, meaning it’s in front of their paywall, not behind it.

And that’s just the NLL content. As I said, there are other lacrosse leagues available as well as hockey, basketball, football, cycling, track and field, soccer, rugby, auto racing, and a bunch more.

FloSports also recognizes that there is a lot of crossover with hockey, particularly in Canada. They will be leveraging their coverage of both sports to make sure that, in Brian’s words, “hockey fans know that you can also watch FloLacrosse with a FloHockey subscription and vice versa. We want to make sure that people know that and get the most out of their Flo subscription”. It’s in FloSports’s own best interest to promote the hell out of the NLL.

Cost

Obviously the big disadvantage is that watching all NLL games now requires a paid subscription. The regular price is US$155 (CAD$215) per year but as mentioned above, there is a limited-time deal of US$119 (CAD$170), and season ticket holders will pay half of that in the first year. You can also pay monthly for US$40 (CAD$50) / month, but an annual subscription is about the cost of four months. Since the NLL season is about six months long, a monthly subscription makes little sense.

Yes, NLL+ was free. But let’s be realistic: we all knew that producing that number of high-quality game broadcasts and distributing them for free was unsustainable. It was likely that NLL+ would not have been free indefinitely.

The annual subscription of US$155 comes out to $12.92 a month. And yes, for six of those months there are no NLL games, so if that’s all you use FloSports for, you could think of it as $25.84 a month during NLL season. That’s $6.46 a week, or as Ed Derse put it, not much more than the cost of a large latte at Tim Horton’s. And that’s the full price with no discounts. Season ticket holders will be paying something like US$60 or CAD$85 for the first season. That’s US$5 or CAD$7 a month.

Make no mistake: Joel, Ed, and Brian all agreed that paying for a service you used to get for free is not going to make people happy. Joel said that he hopes a lot of the league’s fans will follow them to this new service, but he recognizes that some won’t. But in the end, they decided that the pros outweighed the cons and this was a strong deal for the league.

Summary

Here’s a summary of the pros and cons of this partnership:

Pros

• Same broadcast quality as the last few years
• One game per week plus the Finals will be available on Amazon Prime Video (only in the US), YouTube, and LG channels
• Full-game replays will be available on the NLL YouTube channel
• There will still be games on linear TV on TSN in Canada. Last season, games that were broadcast on TSN were not available for replay on NLL+. This season, they will be available for replay on both YouTube and FloSports.
• FloSports is providing a one-time discount for everyone if they sign up in November, and there will also be a one-time half-price deal for NLL season ticket holders
• Once you have the FloSports subscription, you can see everything they provide. There are lots of other sports including a bunch of college sports available.
• FloSports will be providing additional NLL content that they are paying for and will not be behind the paywall. FloSports seems to be spending a fair bit of money on this deal and on adding the additional content.
• This might be the biggest pro: the league finally has a company paying them to broadcast games. The league is no longer eating the cost of such broadcasting (as they’ve done for the last two years).

Cons

• Watching games other than the Saturday Showcase requires a paid subscription. I do understand that for many people, this one con outweighs all of the pros above.
• In general, there will be no other games on linear TV in the US. However the FAQ the league provided does say “NLL clubs may also carry approved games on local TV”. The FAQ on the FloSports site also says “The partnership also preserves opportunities for U.S. national linear television broadcasts” though the league has said that there won’t be such an option this season.
• “MultiView” feature only supports two games

Conclusion

Before you call me a shill, I am getting nothing from the league for posting this information. I was surprised about this announcement and wanted to talk to Joel and Ed to get the lowdown on why this was done. Does it suck that we now have to pay to watch NLL games? Yes. Will it lose viewers? Yes. But could it end up being a good deal for the league? The more I heard about it, the more I thought the answer to that is also yes.

It’s been said that the NFL could play an entire season of games to empty stadiums (i.e. ticket revenue of $0) and still make a profit thanks to their TV deals. The NLL isn’t there but if game broadcasts change from the expense side of the income statement to the revenue side, that extra money could do a lot to [note: pure speculation on my part] help stabilize struggling franchises or even bump player salaries.

P. S.

It turns out that I had indeed heard of FloSports before this announcement. First off, they broadcast the Mann Cup this year. I remember noticing at the time that they didn’t have a single-game option – either you paid $50 for a month or $215 for a year just to watch between four and seven games. (I didn’t pay it, and thus the name FloSports disappeared from my memory until Thursday.) I didn’t hear too many great things about the broadcast quality either, but as we covered above, FloSports doesn’t handle the broadcast itself, just the streaming, and we know the Iroquois Lacrosse Arena isn’t known for their top-notch internet access.

The other way I’d known about them is that they have a Canadian office in Waterloo, Ontario, which happens to be in the same building where I work. While taking the stairs past the second floor to the SAP offices on the third floor, I must have seen the FloSports logo a bunch of times, but I guess it never registered with me so I didn’t recognize it as the company that did the Mann Cup just a month ago, and I didn’t recognize it as the company in yesterday’s NLL announcement either.