Skate Canada International taking viewers to a whole new place

With no TV broadcast available this weekend, fans will need to fire up their phones, tablets or computers to catch all the action from Vancouver. And there's lots to see.

Kaiya Ruiter of Calgary is one of the Canadian skaters competing at Skate Canada International this weekend in Vancouver, which will be available to viewers only via the streaming route (Photo by Danielle Earl/Skate Canada).

In years gone by, the playbook for watching Skate Canada International was pretty simple and routine. You’d flick on CTV, which televised the sport for many years, and hear the familiar voices of Rod Black and accomplished analysts of the sport such as Tracy Wilson, Debbi Wilkes or Barb Underhill. They were such fixtures in our living rooms.

That coverage would eventually switch over to TSN (which is in the same broadcast family as CTV). The past few years, CBC grabbed the torch and it was a whole lot of Brenda Irving, Kurt Browning, Carol Lane, Scott Russell and Andi Petrillo. And they became our new familiar voices.

Starting this weekend, however, you’ll need more than just your TV set to see the goings on at SCI in Vancouver. There will be no live coverage of the event on any traditional broadcast channel and instead, you’ll find wall-to-wall viewing of Canada’s annual Grand Prix event online. It’s another sign of how things have changed in the skating world, at least in terms of how you watch it.

“The television market has changed so significantly. You can’t find skating on a main network anywhere in our country,” said Ted Barton, executive producer of Skate Canada Productions, which is the creative force behind the presentation you’ll see this weekend (in Canada, it can be found on SkateCanada.ca, as well as cbcsports.ca and CBC Gem). “And our numbers were three times bigger than CBC’s numbers last year. Our streaming numbers were bigger than their television numbers. So we’ve transitioned the viewership of our sport.

“If you take a look at this, the ISU streams all their competitions. If you really are a skating fan, you can go on isu.org and watch Skate America and watch from France and watch from China. You don’t get that on TV but you get it on streaming. Everything at Skate Canada is on streaming. So if you know how to stream on your phone or your iPad or computer, skating exists there. You don’t need it on TV. And on TV, some days, it’s a day old and you’ve got a lot of commercials, or you’re only seeing the top six skaters. It doesn’t serve the people who are interested in the sport, but it does serve an older generation. It serves that generation quite nicely. It’s just different and it’s changing.”

None of this is happening by accident. The sport world wide is in an evolution in terms of how it makes its events accessible to more people. Previously, only countries that paid for television rights could show events to skating fans there. But taking the sport online, where the price to watch is merely the time you choose to invest in it, is expanding its reach globally.

“We’ve tried to gravitate the skating fans around the world to watch skating online. Now, did that hurt television? Maybe marginally, but television was already kind up giving up a little bit world wide on the sport anyways. We had to move them into a format that everybody can access,” said Barton. “What we have noticed … is we have a growing viewership in places like Brazil, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait. All over the world, the fan base is growing because they’ve never seen the sport. Now they can access it for free and they go ‘woah, what is this thing? This is amazing!’ So we’ve increased the fan base globally … the sport is growing because it has been accessible online. Although we have lost a little in television revenue, we’re gaining from the perspective of growing the sport globally.

“The growth of the sport globally can happen, is happening because of streaming. Television can’t do that, doesn’t do that, because a country like Chile is never going to buy rights. But if they can access it online, they can (watch it).”

You can also find ways to take your fans a little deeper into the sport. For example, at Skate Canada International this weekend, for the first time fans can watch live streams of the practice sessions on Thursday (which get started at 1 p.m. ET), and on Friday and Saturday before the events begin at the Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre. And there’s also an added bonus for those who show up at the venue to take it all in.

“We’ll cover all three days of practice; we’ve not done that before, but we’re going to add this to our menu. And we’ll have commentary around it. (Our commentators) need to watch it anyway, so why not watch it and share their thoughts and their comments and their stories?” said Barton. “At the same time, we’ll be feeding to SkateBug Radio. So people in the audience can buy their earpiece for 10 bucks and be part of the conversation while they’re watching the practice sessions and the competition. We did that a number of years ago and it was very popular. It made people feel like ‘this is so cool, I get to listen to Kaetlyn Osmond talk about the women, now I understand more.’ And they can send us a text question and get feedback. So we’re trying to fan engage to a much higher degree.”

Barton, who is a familiar voice to those who follow the Junior Grand Prix circuit regularly, will be the host for the online broadcasts. Four recently retired Canadian skaters — 2018 World champion Kaetlyn Osmond, Kevin Reynolds, Kirsten Moore-Towers and Kaitlyn Weaver — are being brought in as commentators. There will also be a French-language feed, which will feature former Quebec skaters Charlie Bilodeau, Alicia Pineault, Elizabeth Paradis and Laurence Darveau.

The use of more contemporary analysts is part of a strategy that Barton presented to the Skate Canada board about five years ago. It is aimed at growing the sport from the grassroots level.

“The concept behind this was not just about trying to do television. It wasn’t that at all. It was about trying to get young athletes who have retired inspiring the next generation,” he explained. “When you hear from a Kirsten Moore-Towers about what it feels like, or you see a throw or whatever and they explain their process and how they dealt with it, young skaters who hear that can say ‘oh, I get that, I understand.’ So it was to inspire and encourage and to some degree educate parents, coaches, skaters from the voice of a person they just saw who lived it and did it. That was the concept and we’re sticking with it. And it continues to grow.”

The same production is being used for the Canadian championships in Calgary in January. Barton’s crew will also supply in-venue SkateBug Radio commentary for fans in attendance at the 2024 World Championships to be held in March at the Bell Centre in Montreal.

“We will have a small team of French and English (commentators) there. So if you’re in the audience or in the media, you’ll get a pre-event little show and you’ll have commentary during the performances,” he said. “After the skate, they’ll say ‘let’s take a look at the replay,’ and the video replays are on the video board (in the arena). Whatever they say will be referring to what you see in the building. So it’s like sitting at home talking with a bunch of people at the same time you’re watching the event live.”

Smaller productions are also planned for the Skate Canada Challenge events (senior/junior, Nov. 29-Dec. 3 in Winnipeg; pre-novice/novice, Feb. 1-4 in Oakville, Ontario), as well as the novice national championships, Feb. 21-25 in Waterloo, Ontario. Each will include live streaming of all the competitors.

“We’ll give (viewers) some content around that,” said Barton, who’ll do those events with Joni McPhail, a former Canadian novice champion, now a coach/executive director at Skate Oakville. “We’ll tell the stories, we’ll interview the champions, we’ll interview some Skate Canada people on breaks. Then you can watch the skating, see the scores, watch that all live.”

It’s a whole new viewing world for Canadian skating fans, indeed. Here’s the streaming schedule as listed on cbc.ca for the competition on Friday and Saturday (all times listed are Eastern).

Silver lining at Skate America

The Grand Prix Series kicked off last weekend at Skate America in Allen, Texas, and it was a heavy medal affair for at least four Canadian skaters.

In pairs, Lia Pereira of Milton, Ontario, and Trennt Michaud of Brantford, Ontario, made their Grand Prix debut a splashy one, bringing home the silver medals. They finished just 1.64 points behind Germany’s Annika Hocke and Robert Kunkel, who had edged them by an even narrower margin to take the bronze medal at Nebelhorn Trophy earlier this season.

“Overall, this has been a wonderful experience,” Pereira said. “It’s extra special as it’s our first Grand Prix medal which is super exciting. It wasn’t a perfect (free) skate, but we moved on and we did the best we could with what we had, and we’re really pleased with how our whole program went.”

The ice dance event produced an equally satisfying result for Marjorie Lajoie of Boucherville, Quebec, and Zachary Lagha of Saint-Hubert, Quebec, who placed second behind reigning World champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates of the United States.

“This means a lot, we’re both really happy. We are both really starting to like skating in the USA – the crowd is good, the rink is nice, and it’s an honour to be with such fun competitors, and this just means a lot,” said Lagha.

Stephen Gogolev of Toronto finished 11th in the men’s event.