As of the 2017 NFL season, CTV and TSN broadcast Sunday games. Monday Night Football airs exclusively on TSN. TSN and CTV 2 own rights to Sunday Night Football and Thursday Night Football. RDS carries games in the French language from all timeslots. U.S. network television feeds may also be available, often from multiple markets, on cable and satellite (and via terrestrial broadcast in the border lands); all games are subject to simultaneous substitution.
Network overview
DAZN
As the premier rights-holder of NFL Game Pass in Canada, DAZN is the only place to watch all preseason, regular-season (including Thursday night, Sunday night and Monday night games) and playoff games, plus exclusive access to RedZone.[1]
DAZN also streams LIVE 24/7 access to NFL Network, as well as complete coverage of marquee events like the NFL Draft and Combine.
Archived Super Bowl and NFL playoff games are also available on DAZN.[2]
Citytv
Craig Media (including the Citytv stations in Winnipeg and Alberta) owned the rights to Monday Night Football in the early 2000s, and these rights moved to City for MNF's final season on ABC in 2005, before being moving again to TSN in 2006.
With the sale to Rogers, Citytv Vancouver carried late afternoon games during the 2007 season (as did OMNI.2 in Toronto), under sublicence from Rogers Sportsnet. For the 2008 season, all Citytv stations carried late afternoon games. Sportsnet carried a different game than the game broadcast by Citytv. Citytv Toronto also airs selected Buffalo Bills preseason games (including those held at the Rogers Centre).
CTV and TSN assumed rights to 4:05 pm and 4:25 pm ET games in 2014 as a result of Rogers acquiring exclusive national rights to the National Hockey League. In the 2015 season, Citytv aired some Thursday night games due to scheduling conflicts with Major League Baseball games on Sportsnet. (These games also aired on Sportsnet One.)
CTV Television Network
On May 22, 2007, it was announced that CTV had acquired the broadcast rights to the National Football League early-afternoon Sunday games, the full NFL playoffs, and the Super Bowl, effective the 2007 NFL season.[3] This ended a lengthy association between the NFL and Global Television Network. TSN, a sports channel which CTV owns, also airs NFL games and produces the CTV broadcasts in tandem with CBS and Fox.
Global Television Network
Aside from its brief experiment with soccer, the Global Television Network has never had an in-house sports production division as do CBC and CTV/TSN. Network sports broadcasts are either simulcast with American networks or outsourced to independent producers such as Molstar. Global was the longtime broadcaster of National Football League football games in Canada, an association that ended in 2007 when CTV outbid Global for the NFL broadcast package.
The Sports Network
TSN airs ESPN original programming, including Sunday NFL Countdown and Monday Night Football. In addition to Monday Night Football, TSN broadcasts NBC Sunday Night Football. Since the 2007 NFL season, it produces Sunday afternoon telecasts for CTV, although the feed is taken from CBS or Fox.
In Canada, the established sports channel TSN held the rights to the game, as it did for all NFL Network regular-season games at the time. After the NBC / CBS simulcast was announced, TSN's parent broadcast network CTV announced it too would carry the game, allowing CTV simultaneous substitution rights over U.S. stations broadcasting the game.[4] This meant that, in areas of eastern Canada receiving their "big three" network affiliates from Boston, the CTV signal was seen on four different basic-cable channels, in addition to TSN's broadcast (which only differed from CTV in terms of network identification and some commercials).
Réseau des sports
Because very few sporting events broadcast by RDS are carried by any other French-language broadcaster, exact simulcasts of other broadcasters on RDS are extremely rare. However, for most events occurring either outside Quebec or not involving Quebec-based teams, RDS will rely on the applicable English-language broadcaster (Canadian or American) for the video feed, including any graphics or game updates in the original feed.
The visuals are then "dubbed" live-to-air with commentators in the RDS studios, who call the game off monitors instead of being on-site. The commentary is not a translation of the English language audio, although the background audio typically remains intact, and relevant information from the English commentary (e.g. injury reports, or explanations of onscreen graphics) may or may not be relayed by the RDS announcers. Interviews aired during the broadcast are undubbed, though announcers will translate what is said after the interview ends.
Sportsnet
For the 2005-2013 seasons, Sportsnet aired Sunday afternoon NFL action, splitting late games across the Pacific and West feeds, and the East and Ontario feeds. The games not shown in the opposite regions were also carried by Rogers-owned Citytv stations in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Montreal. Sportsnet also broadcast Thursday Night Football and held rights to all Thanksgiving Day games between 2009-2016.
NFL Sunday Ticket
In Canada, NFL Sunday Ticket has been made available on the online subscription service DAZN as well as on the following satellite and cable providers on a non-exclusive basis:
- Bell Satellite TV
- Shaw Direct
- Access Communications
- Cogeco
- Eastlink
- Rogers Cable
- Shaw Communications
- Vidéotron
- Westman Communications
The lack of exclusivity for any provider is due to Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regulations.