NHL, Roku Team Up To Screw Masses

The NHL is proudly touting the upgrades made to its NHL GameCenter LIVE package, which now features exclusive camera angles and all sorts of other toys for hockey fans willing to pony up the $159 that buys an all-inclusive (out-of-market) package. That's assuming you have a device that will play it, though, and the new version of NHL's Roku app suddenly silences a large percentage of those set-top boxes.

We saw this shit from the NBA last year, and Roku is offering the same $15-off-a-$100-device deal to upgrade that they did a year ago. Let's make this perfectly clear: older Roku boxes are fully capable of handling the video streams produced by the NHL's online provider. But this is an age of planned obsolescence, so users who invested heavily in Roku early get left in the dark. (I own five Roku boxes; the new version of NHL GameCenter LIVE no longer works with four of them.)

The NHL will refund your money if you cancel within five days of subscription—but if you subscribed on Oct. 2, as many people did, a full week passed before the season started. So you won't be getting your money back, and your only option is to buy a new Roku box (or some other brand that isn't trying to rip you off).