A new study shows Sens fans are paying an estimated 15 per cent more to watch their favourite team from the couch in 2026-27.

The rising cost of watching Ottawa Senators games from home, coupled with a fragmented live sports streaming landscape, has some hockey fans fed up and threatening to sail the internet’s high seas.

While the Senators’ season opener against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday night will be broadcast nationally on Sportsnet, there will undoubtedly be fans scrambling ahead of puck drop before Ottawa’s second game of the regular season — against the Boston Bruins — which just happens to be the debut of Sportsnet’s Monday Night Hockey. That’s because it’s can only be watched via streaming on Sportsnet+.

If you’re already paying for Sportsnet channels through Rogers Xfinity, no sweat. Rogers Communications announced that Sportsnet+ will be added at no extra cost to existing packages.

But if you get your television services from any other provider, well, that’ll be $12.99 per month to watch the grand total of seven Monday night Senators games exclusively on Sportsnet+, thank you kindly.

Sens fans on social media, meanwhile, responded to the extra costs with pictures of pirate flags and references to specific illicit streaming sites where people can watch the games for free, albeit illegally.

Responding to a request for comment for this story, a Rogers spokesperson told the Citizen, “Sportsnet is working with other Canadian distribution partners to give their TV subscribers additional options to access this Sportsnet+ content.”

There is no timeline for any side deals to be announced.

And if Sens fans are keen on catching all 84 games this season, they’ll also need an Amazon Prime subscription to watch several Wednesday night games — which would cost an additional $9.99/month.

Meanwhile, TSN still has TV rights to the majority of games this season.

For those who ditched cable and satellite years ago, the absolute lowest price to watch the entirety of the Senators’ 2026-27 regular season — if you’re only paying for services during the specific months they broadcast games — is $519.61 (CAD), taxes included.

Here’s how we got to that number:

• Sportsnet+ (Standard) for seven months — $276.77
• TSN Direct (Standard) for seven months — $197.68
• Amazon Prime for four months — $45.16

That’s $6.19 per game.

But deactivating and reactivating will be tedious — Senators games on Sportsnet+ and Prime are scattered across five separate months. The total cost for yearly subscriptions to all of Sportsnet+ (Premium), TSN Direct (Premium) and Amazon Prime is $807.81.

And you haven’t even stepped inside an arena yet.

Tech analyst and journalist Carmi Levy sees the irony in all this.

“(Streaming services’) original value proposition to consumers was that they would free us from the tyranny of cable and satellite subscriptions, that they would offer us more content for less money,” Levy told the Citizen in a phone interview. “Fast forward a few years and now we’ve realized that we are spending more to see the same amount of content, and we’re spending across more platforms than a single cable provider or a single satellite provider.

“In a way, that original promise of more for less has turned out to be a pipe dream and consumers find themselves making individual decisions on subscriptions for ever smaller slices of an increasingly subdivided pie.”

A Casino.org study of more than 2,000 Canadian hockey fans found that 48 per cent of Senators fans surveyed have cancelled or avoided purchasing a required subscription for the upcoming season, while 43 per cent have used an unofficial online stream to watch their favourite team in the past.

The survey, completed in September, says it estimates Sens fans’ month-to-month viewing costs have risen by as much as 15 per cent for 2026-27. Meanwhile, in three western Canadian markets — Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver — it costs around $200 less to watch hockey, as TSN doesn’t own regional broadcasting rights of Flames, Oilers or Canucks games.

Just three seasons ago, Sens fans needed only to pay for basic versions of Sportsnet and TSN — easily bundled in a TV package — in order to watch their beloved team from pre-season to playoffs.

But this new, fractured broadcast landscape is here to stay.

Rogers is now into its second consecutive 12-year media rights deal with the National Hockey League. For those dozen years, Prime Video has a sub-licensing agreement with Rogers to broadcast Wednesday night action. In Ottawa, TSN has its own 12-year deal for regional rights.

There’s no telling how exorbitant the price of watching hockey from your couch will get in the coming years.

A couple months before dropping the Monday Night Hockey bomb, Sportsnet informed premium subscribers that their annual fee was rising by $20 to $344.99 (plus taxes), a 5.8 per cent jump.

People weren’t happy, but the reaction paled in comparison to that of the company’s decision a year prior to jack up prices by $75 to $324.99, a 30 per cent increase. That hike was the final straw for many, including former Senators defenceman Marc Methot, who tweeted, “We just cancelled ours a few weeks ago. The prices are getting ridiculous.”

In both cases, the year-over-year inflation rate in Canada was significantly less than Sportnet’s increases — 2.1 per cent in 2025; tracking for 2.6 per cent in 2026.

Admittedly, there will more be more hockey on Sportsnet this season. The company is lifting 150 regional blackouts while broadcasting more national games.

Then there is the death of Hockey Night in Canada, as CBC will no longer show NHL games. The once iconic broadcast will be rebranded as Saturday Night Hockey on Sportsnet.

“Any Canadian with a radio, and then eventually a TV, could consume (Hockey Night in Canada on CBC),” Levy noted, “and everyone could have that shared common experience. Now, we’re moving away from that. And who’s taking that away from us? These corporate interests whose sole focus, frankly, is profitability and growth. You know, terms like ARPU, average revenue per user, and maximizing the amount of money, the revenue that they can extract from each one of us for the privilege of watching one of their games, which is anathema to decades of Canadian culture around sport.”

Free NHL hockey in Canada is now extinct. And Sens fans need three separate streaming services to watch their team.

“It just bothers me,” said Levy. “Any other business, you can decide to opt out and you can probably find something else to do. But if that’s your team that you’re rooting for, it’s very difficult to completely opt out of it and not feel like you’ve lost part of your community, your culture, your connectedness to others.

“Ultimately, that’s what sports is, and if we lose that, we lose a lot more than a boxscore on a Monday morning.”