NHL Gamecenter Live Now Available On PSN

Sony has announced that NHL GameCenter Live, an online service offering streaming video of live out-of-market hockey games, is now available for the 2011-2012 NHL regular season on the PS3, allowing users to stream games in high definition, subject to local blackout restrictions.

Additionally, all PS3 users in North America and Canada can download the NHL GameCenter application for free this season. Users without a subscription to NHL GameCenter Live can still access a wide range of NHL content through the application, including post-game highlights, team schedules, standings, player stats and a full NHL scoreboard.

NHL GameCenter Live subscribers can stream game broadcasts in HD by downloading the NHL GameCenter application from the PlayStation Network on their PS3 system. Beyond live hockey games, subject to blackouts, the service also lets subscribers watch full-length and condensed replays of current-season games they missed, available 48 hours after airing with no blackouts, and gives unlimited access to more than 800 classic games through the NHL Vault.

“PlayStation 3 is the only system to stream live hockey games in HD,” said Brandon Stander, director of marketing for PlayStation Network. “NHL GameCenter Live adds the excitement of professional hockey to the strongest HD sports offering on any console.”

The NHL GameCenter application for PS3 includes enhanced streaming capabilities for the 2011-12 season. Subscribers can select from home and away broadcasts available in HD to follow their favorite teams even while on the road, follow the action from around the league with live scoreboard updates, and plan what to watch using the full season calendar. The app also offers live stats, standings and post-game highlights for all 2010-11 games, along with the ability to pause, fast-forward, rewind or jump to key points of interest for 2011-12 games using on-screen event data indicators, and to flip between live video and other GameCenter features while the video keeps playing in the background.

The NHL Vault adds classic games that relive historic hockey moments dating back to the 1960s, condensed games offering 10-12 minute extended highlights of games missed, and a game archive with full-length replays of every game since the 2008-2009 season.

To subscribe to NHL GameCenter, users can visit www.ps3.com/nhl to create an account and link it to their PS3 system using a registration code obtained through the app on their device. NHL GameCenter Live is priced at $159 (U.S.) for an annual subscription and includes the NHL Vault service.

The blackout restrictions attached to the service are standard practice for league-run streaming products of this era rather than something unique to the PlayStation 3 rollout. Local broadcast rights for a given team are typically sold separately to regional cable providers, so a streaming service has to withhold games airing in that team’s home market to avoid conflicting with those existing broadcast deals. That’s why a subscriber can generally watch an out-of-market team with no trouble, while a home-market matchup for the local team may show up as blacked out on the same service.

Putting the NHL Vault’s archive on the PS3 also represents a fairly ambitious use of a console for something other than gaming at the time. Bundling several full seasons’ worth of replays and decades of classic games into a subscription that runs through the console itself, rather than a separate cable package or a dedicated streaming box, was part of a broader push during this generation to position the PS3 as a hub for video entertainment beyond just games, alongside services like Netflix and Hulu that were also expanding onto consoles around the same period.