Watching the Ottawa Senators from home is getting pricier, and this season’s broadcast setup makes that impossible to ignore.
Saturday night’s opener against the Toronto Maple Leafs will be on Sportsnet nationally, but the headaches begin right after that. Ottawa’s second game of the regular season, against the Boston Bruins, is also the debut of Sportsnet’s Monday Night Hockey, and it can only be streamed on Sportsnet+.
For fans already getting Sportsnet through Rogers Xfinity, that’s no added charge. Rogers Communications said Sportsnet+ will be included at no extra cost in those existing packages.
Everyone else is looking at another monthly bill. If your TV service comes from another provider, Sportsnet+ will cost $12.99 per month for the seven Monday night Senators games that are exclusive to the service.
The reaction from Sens fans was immediate online, with some posting pictures of pirate flats and pointing to illegal streaming sites where the games can be watched for free.
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.
The costs don’t stop there. Fans who want to follow all 84 Senators games this season will also need Amazon Prime for several Wednesday night matchups, which adds another $9.99 per month.
TSN still carries most of Ottawa’s games, but the full picture is now spread across multiple services. For fans who cut the cord years ago, the cheapest way to watch the entire Senators’ 2026-27 regular season, paying only during the months games are actually on those platforms, comes to $519.61 CAD with taxes included.
That total breaks down like this:
Sportsnet+ (Standard) for seven months - $276.77
TSN Direct (Standard) for seven months - $197.68
Amazon Prime for four months - $45.16
That works out to $6.19 per game.
Even that low-end route comes with a catch. Sportsnet+ and Prime games are spread across five separate months, so switching subscriptions on and off would be a chore. If someone simply keeps yearly subscriptions active, the total climbs to $807.81 for Sportsnet+ (Premium), TSN Direct (Premium) and Amazon Prime.
And that’s before a fan buys a ticket.
Tech analyst and journalist Carmi Levy said the whole setup runs against what streaming was supposed to solve.
“(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 buying a required subscription for the upcoming season, while 43 per cent said they have used an unofficial online stream to watch their team in the past.
Completed in September, the survey also estimated Sens fans’ month-to-month viewing costs have risen by as much as 15 per cent for 2026-27. In Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, by contrast, it costs about $200 less to watch hockey because TSN does not own regional rights to Flames, Oilers or Canucks games.
Just three seasons ago, Senators fans could get by with basic Sportsnet and TSN packages, usually bundled into a TV subscription, and follow the team from pre-season to playoffs.
That’s no longer the case. Prime Video struck a 12-year agreement with the NHL in July to carry Wednesday night games, Rogers has its own 12-year renewal beginning this season, and TSN has a local deal in Ottawa as well.
The result is a broadcast landscape that keeps splitting into smaller pieces, with no sign of the price easing up.
Sportsnet also told premium subscribers a couple months before the Monday Night Hockey announcement that annual fees would rise by $20 to $344.99 plus taxes, a 5.8 per cent increase.
That drew complaints, but not nearly as many as the year before, when the company raised prices by $75 to $324.99, a 30 per cent jump. Former Senators defenceman Marc Methot was among those who reacted strongly, tweeting, “We just cancelled ours a few weeks ago. The prices are getting ridiculous.”
Those increases landed well above Canada’s inflation rate, which was 2.1 per cent in 2025 and is tracking at 2.6 per cent in 2026.
There will be more hockey on Sportsnet this season, at least. The network is lifting 150 regional blackouts and taking on more national games after CBC’s role in Hockey Night in Canada ended. The longtime broadcast will be rebranded as Saturday Night Hockey.
In Other News...
Senators Face Two Big Questions Before Opening Night Vs Toronto
Training camp is winding down in Ottawa, and the Senators are still sorting through the kinds of roster choices that tend to define the final days before a season begins. Final forward and defense spots are still up for grabs, and the staff is balancing those decisions with the usual late-camp work on special teams, all while trying to get the group pointed in the right direction for an opener that arrives quickly on Oct. 3 against Toronto.
The uncertainty does not stop with the bubble players, either. Ottawa is also dealing with injuries to key pieces as it heads into the first week of the regular season, which adds another layer to the lineup picture and makes the final roster decisions even more significant. For a team that wants to open on solid footing against the Maple Leafs, the next few days could shape not just the roster, but the tone of the early season. [Read more 🡒]
Senators Roster Battle Just Got Real Before Opening Night
Training camp has been whittled down to the point where the next few days will tell Ottawa a lot about how the opening-night roster is going to take shape. The Senators cut their group nearly in half, moving a large chunk of players out of camp as the organization begins the harder part of the process, separating those who can help now from those who need more time elsewhere.
A mix of forwards and defensemen is still in the picture as Ottawa works toward the NHL deadline, with familiar names such as Claude Giroux, Tim Stutzle, Drake Batherson and Ridly Greig among those still in camp. The numbers are getting tighter, the decisions are getting tougher, and the last round of evaluation figures to be the one that really matters. [Read more 🡒]
Canadiens-Senators Flashpoint Leaves Ottawa Fans With One NHL Question
The preseason meeting between the Canadiens and Senators produced more than just an early look at two Atlantic Division rivals. The NHL Department of Player Safety fined Montreal defenseman Mike Matheson for roughing Ottawa forward Ridly Greig, a decision that at least gives the flashpoint some formal closure from the leagues side. The money goes to the Players Emergency Assistance Fund, and it lands as another entry on Mathesons long list of discipline-related run-ins during his NHL career.
For Ottawa, the bigger issue is less about the dollar amount than the temperature this kind of exchange can bring to a game before the points even start counting. Greig was at the center of the incident, and Senators fans will be watching closely the next time these teams meet to see whether the edge carries over. The league stepped in on Matheson, but the broader question around how that play gets handled moving forward is still hanging there. [Read more 🡒]