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The National Hockey League (NHL) is shown on national television in the United States and Canada. With 25 teams in the U.S. and 7 in Canada, the NHL is the only one of the four major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada that maintains separate national broadcasters in each country, each producing separate telecasts of a slate of regular season games, playoff games, and the Stanley Cup Finals.
National broadcasting rights in Canada have included Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC), a long-standing Canadian tradition that debuted on CBC Television in 1952. Since the 2014–15 season, Rogers Sportsnet has held the Canadian national contract, sub-licensing a slate of games to the CBC, and sub-licensing the national French-language rights to TVA Sports.
Historically, the NHL never held a long-term exclusive deal with a U.S. national broadcast network prior to the 1994–95 NHL season. NBC and CBS held rights at various times from 1956 to 1981, but neither broadcast network carried anything close to a full schedule. The NHL on a national scale primarily was only available on cable television throughout most of the 1980s and early 1990s until Fox began televising a regular slate of games in 1995. Since then, exclusive U.S. national coverage has been split between broadcast and cable. Since the 2021–22 season, the NHL has been shown on the ABC network; cable networks ESPN, TBS, and TNT; and internet streaming services ESPN+ and Hulu.
Individual teams in both countries have contracted to air their games on local channels, primarily on regional sports networks.