Hockey East To Announce League-Wide Streaming Package With CBS? Plus NESN Partnership

It was ANNOUNCE (ALMOST) EVERYTHING day over at Hockey East on Thursday as the league dropped a whole bunch of news all at once. After dropping the men’s (BC as preseason #1!) and women’s (BC as preseason #3) coaches polls, the league also announced a major partnership with NESN, giving the New England league a legitimate television home on a network that almost everyone in the region gets.

That’s a huge win for the league, even if not every game will be on the channel. Over 100 Hockey East contests will be on NESN or NESNplus this season, including 21 women’s games. A whopping 15 of those games will be BC Men’s Hockey — nearly half of the schedule — and a very impressive 7 will be BC Women’s Hockey. That doesn’t even include the Beanpot, which is traditionally shown on NESN as well.

But the news yet to be announced is where everyone’s games will be that aren’t on NESN. If you do a crawl through each team’s schedule, you’ll notice that nobody has their streaming links up, either to their provider from last year or otherwise. BC’s games no longer show on ESPN3 either on the schedule or on an ESPN search.

The first league contest is today at 6pm between Boston College and Merrimack at Lawler Rink, and the Merrimack Women’s Hockey program tweeted out a bit cryptically:

We have an EYEBALLS emoji, folks.

Well, sources close to BC Interruption have told us that Hockey East has partnered with CBS College Sports Live for its first-ever league-wide streaming package. And there’s some evidence out there to support an imminent announcement, too. If you head over to CollegeSportsLive.com, you’ll notice under “Partners” that there’s a selection in the dropdown for “Hockey East,” with several men’s and women’s games across the conference already loaded.

Now, the games at this point are all listed as “free,” but don’t get too excited about that. Our source has said they expect the streaming deal to be subscription-based. Fortunately, College Sports Live’s model is very affordable at only $9.99 per month — more than reasonable considering you should be getting every game across the league.

Look for an official announcement to come from the league on the details, but with the puck dropping on the league’s first game in just a few hours, you would think it should be coming pretty soon.