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Move over, Monday Night Football.
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While the National Hockey League’s new Canadian themed English Language streams to begin the viewing week won’t likely siphon too many loyal viewers away from the NFL during its season, the show is just one of a three-pronged promotion with Amazon Prime, along with a Thursday evening news/entertainment package, Coast to Coast, and the Prime docu-series ‘Faceoff: Inside the NHL’.
The MNH schedule begins Thanksgiving Monday with Sidney Crosby and the Penguins in Montreal, followed by Tampa Bay at Toronto. Coast to Coast, co-hosted by Andi Petrillo and Adnan Virk, will feature rotating analysts, celebrities and will be modelled on NFL Red Zone, with updates on multiple games, big goals, saves and hits.
It will attempt to lure the younger interactive viewer, the poolie and the casual fan for the some of the ‘appointment viewing’ long dominated by Hockey Night in Canada.
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“People are going to like the bounce factor from game to game,” said Steve Mayer, the NHL’s chief content officer, during a launch event Monday at Toronto’s Steam Whistle Brewery.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was also on hand as the MNH crew were introduced; veteran Hartford/Carolina/Seattle play-by-play man John Forslund, analysts Mark Messier, Jody Shelley, Thomas Hickey, Shane Hnidey and pro women’s player Blake Bolden.
“Amazon (a recent league collaborator behind stats technology) will bring the ‘wow’ factor,” Bettman predicted. “We’re a big deal in Canada and they’ll make us even bigger. This is probably more accessible in where our games are delivered than any other distribution mode we have in Canada.
“They will break some tradition, which isn’t such a bad thing for Generation Z (those born in the late 1990s) and Generation A (2010 forward).”
Lhornby@postmedia
X: @sunhornby
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