“SRF Sport Boss Criticizes Low Ratings for National League Hockey Broadcasts”

For the first time, a National League season ended on Thursday without SRF broadcasting a single live ice hockey game. The reason: In March 2022, “CH Media” secured the free TV rights for the next five years. In an SRF internal interview, Roland Mägerle, Head of SRF Sport, takes stock after the first year without live broadcast – and hands it out properly against the competition.

The SRF Sport boss mainly refers to the ratings. “If we compare the rating for the 2021/22 season at SRF with the rating of the German-speaking Swiss free TV stations for the 2022/23 season, a clear picture emerges,” says Mägerle. While in the penultimate season around 184,000 viewers tuned in to an average playoff game on SRF, last season it was only around 77,000 on TV24 and 3+.

The differences in western Switzerland are even clearer. The quarter and semi-finals would only have attracted around 8,000 people per game this year to the Léman Bleu channel. In the previous year, there were still 55,000 in the transmissions on SRF. “This is a very unpleasant development for Swiss ice hockey and potential spectators,” says Mägerle.

Free TV rights holder “CH Media” itself has recently been satisfied with the ratings and writes of up to 500,000 viewers per playoff final game. Mägerle counters: “These TV numbers should be treated with caution, at least a classification is necessary. The messages mentioned were often worked with net ranges in seconds.» With this method, each person would be counted who “zapped” through the transmitter for just one second. SRF itself uses the key figure “rating”, i.e. how many people follow an entire program on average.

For the next four seasons, SRF will continue to focus its live ice hockey coverage on competitions other than the National League. In addition to the national team and the Spengler Cup, the Euro Hockey Tour and Champions Hockey League are also to remain “solid pillars of the live program”.