American Sports Network to Cease Operations

Per reports, the American Sports Network will reportedly cease operations at the end of March. ASN was created in 2014 to provide coverage of college athletics. Reports suggest that Campus Insiders may take over the college athletics contracts that ASN is leaving behind. Campus Insiders streams Boston University Hockey games for free with decent production quality, so this could be a step up.

Hockey East’s partnership with ASN was great for people outside of New England that want to watch HEA games and don’t mind mediocre production quality, but it was less than ideal for local fans. The biggest complaint that many Hockey East fans had about ASN is that the network’s scheduling resulted in a number of 6 PM start times. A 6 PM start time is fine on a Saturday, but many of the games affected occurred on weeknights. Most fans going to these games are coming from work on weeknights, making it almost impossible to get to the rink in time for puck drop, particularly if going to an away game. The result of 6 PM start times was low crowd numbers, all in order to broadcast games with little out-of-market interest.

Hopefully a move to Campus Insiders or a different deal will result in improved production quality for those fans that can’t make it to games and normal start times for everyone.