NHL.TV 4+

Edit 1: The day after posting my review in which I stated that the streaming service was inferior to last year’s s offering, the situation pulled a complete 180. HNIC was broadcast in almost its entirety, with the exception of the last 6 seconds of the game being strangely missing. The stream included everything, including the local TV commercials, intermissions, and interviews. The next day, NHL.TV broadcast Molson Leafs Hockey the same way, though it included the entire game and all ancillary content. It’s a month late, but it looks like they finally are getting their act together. I’m raising my review to 3 stars as a result.

Original review:
The app seems to work okay, but the streaming service is inferior this year to that in previous years than in my opinion. There has been a lot of content missing from games. Some periods have started streaming after they were already under way, and so far, I’ve watched games with from 2- to 8-minute blocks of periods missing. The live games seem like live feeds, and the feeds tend to just cut out suddenly, sometimes while the play is still going on, and then they come back minutes later. I suppose it is to cut out commercial breaks, but it doesn’t make sense to cut off the play or cutaway from it so suddenly; that was not how it was in previous years in my experience. It’s very jarring. There also seem to be no interviews or intermission shows this year, which seems a shame. Overall, I don’t know how they have the gall to call the games they show as “full games” when the games I’ve watched have been missing content. The game recaps seem mostly okay, though sometimes there are odd parts where the audio seems to just cut out or be missing.

First review Oct 2022 - This app needs a lot of improvement. It feels like they rushed to release it as the UI is not intuitive and feels strange to navigate. Why have a huge picture on the main page and have to scroll through a small row to find the game(s) you want to watch. I prefer the main app “scores” view with most (or all) the games displayed. The worst bug in this app is I always have to sign in again to watch each stream. Also many feature from the original NHL app are not available. Watch live games from the beginning of the game. My last issue is even if you turn “Hide Scores On” most of the game thumbnails give away who won the game.

Second review Dec 2022 - Still lots of improvement needed. One good thing is that airplay works much better. Still thumbnails are spoilers if you have “hide Scores” turned one. Last bug is watching live streams, about every minute the stream will skip back a second. I have tried to power through watching a game like this but intolerable. It’s better to watch games after they finish but that not acceptable. After the “fans love the digital boards” statement, they have gotten worse. One game had half the boards a black screen and another had the players an inverse color. I thought from my first review things could only get better but unfortunately the opposite or at best a lateral move to solve one issue create two more.

Hiding score functions are good, but if the game is still live it starts playing it live without an option to start streaming from beginning (you have to choose it after it’s already started streaming).

Multiple feeds, but they both say “national,” so you have to guess which one is Canadian and which is American. I’ve wasted many clicks!

Sometimes the national feed isn’t even available, and I’m not even in a blackout zone.

App could be a lot better.