When you combine this with the automatic recurring billing and other tactics, it looks like typical Bettman NHL style.

My only complaint this season is the archiving of games takes too long. Its not 48 as advertised, never less than 72 hours. I know because on my schedule I tend to watch the games only from archives during lunch or late in evenings. I should be able to watch an archived game in no more than 48 hours, after that the game is stale because my team will have played yet another opponent.

I signed up for this service for one playoff game in April 2009 when I was away on vacation. What I didn’t realize when signing up is that under their terms and conditions if you sign up while outside of Canada (I was in California) they will automatically subscribe you to the subsequent seasons.

Much to my dismay, when I received my most recent Visa bill I had a charge on it for a full season’s worth ($160US) of games, even though I didn’t want that and I had never signed up for it. Upon further review of my old Visa bills I had a charge back in April for $80US which I hadn’t noticed at the time that was for a package called “Race for Cup.” I assume this was a package for the rest of the playoff games. Again, I did not want this nor did I sign up for it as I had returned home from my vacation already and was getting all of the games on cable tv.

Upon noticing these charges to my Visa I of course contacted NHL.com to ask for my money back and to cancel my account/subscription. Every time I have called I’ve been told that I must speak to a manager and that the employee will contact the manager and have him/her call or e-mail me. After two weeks now I have heard nothing despite numerous calls back by myself. To cap this all off they will not even let me cancel my account/subcription without talking to a manager. This is clearly beyond ludicrous as no one should require permission or authorization to be able to cancel an ongoing subscription.

This is all obviously very upsetting to me as the NHL’s brand is behind this site and I would have expected a fair and honest service rather than something that I would consider to be a borderline fraud. While I’ve been told that this automatic renewal/negative billing process is legal in New York (where the site is run) I consider it to be unethical and unacceptable for a number of reasons.

I’ve made this post simply as a warning to potential customers of the service that I would stay away from it.

Thanks for reading!

A decent amount of the time I can find a Pens game being streamed on the internet via ustream or somewhere else, but often times the stream is choppy and barely tolerable, and of course there isn’t always a stream.

With Gamecenter I get access to every Pens game available and nearly every other game as well. As for the stream itself, it’s very good quality and the stream is perfect. Also, you get access to every game 2-3 days after it has been broadcasted, and that goes back to the entire 2007-2008 season. It’s awesome to relive some of the great moments of the 2008 playoffs or catch up on a game you missed, etc. Again, the stream is perfect for archived games as well.

If NHL Center Ice had all of their games in HD instead of SD I might have gone that route instead, but Gamecenter to me is easily worth the money with access to so many games past and present. Like others have said, there isn’t much point in it if you only want to see your home team, but if your team is located elsewhere and / or you just love watching hockey whether it’s your team or not then Gamecenter is definitely for you.

But i guess im from Australia and so blackouts only happen for 2 games a week. lol