As you know the last week I’ve been discussing the difficult launch of NHL.TV.

Neulion agreement indicates that launch was rushed

Earlier this morning, I found a public document from Neulion (a publicly traded company) that discusses the transition agreement between them and the NHL.

The NHL is paying Neulion $11MM in consulting services and $1M each season until 2020 to help with the transition and to provide team apps until the end of this season

The original agreement to provide consulting services was supposed to expire at year end, but was extended through All-Star weekend (Amendment A)

In my opinion, this shows that they were rushing to get this live, so they didn’t need to continue paying Neulion. Even with an aggressive Dec. 31 deadline, the date slipped and needed to pushed back to the All-Star game. It seems like they were doing everything they could to not push it back even more.

Alleged MLBAM employee speaks out

More interesting though, a post on Reddit today from a supposed MLBAM employee discussed some of the issues with the launch.

If you purchased GCL via Google Play or App Store, then they need to manually link your account or you won’t be able to log-in

Viewers need perfect bandwith (25mbps+) with no temporary loss in bandwith to receive the high quality stream promoted by NHL.TV

To save costs, the service is using an inferior CDN service for NHL.TV compared to MLB.TV which highlights buffering issues

MLBAM did not secure streaming rights for content in NHL Vault and likely won’t return until next season

MLBAM is using much more aggressive (and more accurate to their credit) blackout detector and actively policing VPN usage

Again, this is an anonymous post of Reddit, so take it for what it’s worth, but if true it’s a pretty damning and explains a lot of the issues fans are seeing.

At this point, I think we all just want to know — when are we going to get the quality service we knew back?