FuboTV Inc. today disclosed a multi-year distribution agreement with the National Hockey League to carry four regional sports networks covering the Carolina Hurricanes, Columbus Blue Jackets, Minnesota Wild and St. Louis Blues, one day before the 2026-27 regular season opens. The channels will be offered to Fubo subscribers inside each club's home market, according to the company, which gave no price, package or channel names.

In Short

Fubo, a streaming TV service that is mostly owned by Disney, will carry the hockey channels of four NHL teams for people who live in those teams' home areas. Those teams lost their old TV home when the company behind FanDuel Sports Network shut its channels down, so the league now makes the broadcasts itself and is signing up distributors one at a time. Amazon's Prime Video and Charter's Spectrum cable service already carry the same teams, so fans in those four markets now have several paid ways to watch rather than one. If you use Fubo in one of those areas, the channels are due to appear on the service this season, but the cost and the exact plan have not been disclosed.

What the agreement covers

The agreement, disclosed today from New York, covers carriage of four regional sports networks (RSNs). Coverage of each club "will be available on the Fubo streaming service for subscribers of each respective market," according to FuboTV Inc., and the networks will be live "in time for the puck to drop on the new season."

That deadline is tight. The NHL's 2026-27 campaign starts on Tuesday, September 29, with a nationally televised tripleheader on ESPN, and the first game of that evening features the Hurricanes raising their 2025-26 Stanley Cup banner against the Florida Panthers. Because that opener is an ESPN national exclusive, the first telecast on the new Carolina channel falls on a later date. The season itself is longer than usual: 84 games per team, the first time since 1993-94 that clubs have played that many, across a league-wide total of 1,344 games, according to the NHL.

What the release leaves out is as notable as what it contains. It does not name the four channels. It does not say how many games each will carry, which Fubo plan includes them, or whether subscribers pay extra. Financial terms are absent, as is any mention of Hulu + Live TV, the entertainment-oriented live service that FuboTV Inc. also owns. As written, the arrangement applies to the Fubo streaming service alone. That distinction has mattered before: when Fubo added ACC Network Extra and SEC Network+ on August 26, the move closed a gap inside the company's own portfolio, because Hulu + Live TV already carried both.

The release also leaves the geography loose. "Respective market" could mean a Nielsen designated market area or the league's own team territory, and the two do not always coincide. The Blues, for example, describe their regional television territory as spanning five states.

Company claims

Much of the rest of the release is positioning. Fubo describes its sports offering as including more than 80,000 live sporting events annually, many in 4K, and "over 50 regional sports networks in its base package at the lowest cost compared to other streaming options." No benchmark, date or competitor list accompanies that price comparison, and it remains the company's own characterisation. Fubo made a comparable claim in October 2024, when it described itself as the only live TV streaming platform carrying every Nielsen-rated sports channel, based on 2023 Nielsen Total Viewers data.

According to the release, Fubo's hockey coverage includes NHL Network, ESPN and ABC, alongside RSNs, and the service offers more than 40,000 TV shows and movies on demand each month. The hockey list does not include TNT, which holds the 2027 Stanley Cup Final exclusively in the United States, according to the NHL's schedule release.

Two executives are quoted. "Hockey fans in the Carolinas, Columbus, Minnesota and St. Louis can enjoy coverage of their favorite teams on Fubo this season," said Todd Mathers, executive vice president, content strategy and acquisition at Fubo. "The addition of these RSNs to our already robust local sports coverage means Fubo subscribers can continue to enjoy their favorite local teams despite recent shifts in sports rights ownership."

David Proper, chief media officer at the NHL, said: "We're excited to bring Hurricanes, Blue Jackets, Wild and Blues games to Fubo. Fans in Carolina, Columbus, Minnesota and St. Louis bring incredible passion and excitement to the game every night and this partnership gives them another great option to watch their team all season long."

How the league ended up holding the rights

"Recent shifts in sports rights ownership" is a mild description of what happened. For roughly two decades, the Hurricanes, Blue Jackets, Wild and Blues appeared on regional channels branded in turn as Fox Sports, Bally Sports and FanDuel Sports Network, according to Daily Faceoff. Main Street Sports Group, the company formerly known as Diamond Sports Group, operated 15 regional channels under the FanDuel Sports Network name and went out of business at the conclusion of the 2025-26 season, according to the Associated Press.

Seven NHL franchises had agreements with Main Street last season. Three found other homes quickly. The Detroit Red Wings moved to Detroit SportsNet, run by team owner Ilitch Sports + Entertainment; the Los Angeles Kings went to Angels Broadcast TV, previously FanDuel Sports Network West; and the Nashville Predators reached an agreement with Scripps Sports, the AP reported. The remaining four turned to the league.

On July 21, 2026, the NHL said that NHL Productions would produce regional broadcasts for the Hurricanes, Blue Jackets, Wild and Blues in 2026-27, and hired Rob McGlarry as general manager of local media. According to Daily Faceoff, the league presented the move as creating more economic opportunities for the clubs and greater flexibility for distribution partners, and signalled that more teams could follow. The AP named the Anaheim Ducks and Dallas Stars as possibilities after the Victory+ streaming service missed rights payments. The Blues framed their own arrangement slightly differently, saying the club brought experienced production staff in-house to produce locally televised games from St. Louis under NHL oversight.

The collapse also removed an advertising business. In July 2025, FanDuel Sports Network reported a 25% year-over-year increase in total impressions served through Magnite's SpringServe platform, across a portfolio then described as 15 regional networks covering MLB, NHL and NBA teams. Fubo had been one of that network's distributors, and from October 2024 it also sold FanDuel Sports Network as a standalone subscription without a base plan. Neither product exists in that form now.

Three routes to the same game

Fubo is not the first distributor to sign on for these four clubs, and the league was reported last week to be negotiating with others.

On September 2, 2026, Prime Video secured in-market streaming rights for six NHL clubs - the Hurricanes, Ducks, Blue Jackets, Stars, Wild and Blues - covering regular-season games along with pregame, postgame and team programming, according to Sports Video Group. Each club sets its own pricing. For the Wild and the Blues, the add-on costs $19.99 a month or $99.99 a year. The Blues said Prime Video would carry 73 locally televised regular-season games, every game except the 11 on national television, and that the club was finalising cable, satellite and over-the-air agreements at the time.

Three weeks later, cable arrived. On September 23, Sports Business Journal reported, in coverage summarised by Awful Announcing, that the NHL had struck multiyear linear distribution deals with Charter's Spectrum for the same four clubs. Spectrum is the largest cable provider in the St. Louis, Columbus and Raleigh markets, while it trails Comcast's Xfinity in the Twin Cities, and the league was still negotiating with other pay-TV distributors in those markets, according to that report. The structure differs from the old RSN model: instead of a fixed rights fee, teams receive a per-subscriber fee, similar to the way other cable networks are paid. The Blue Jackets and Wild will also simulcast select games on free over-the-air stations, with the Blues pursuing a similar arrangement. The Stars and Ducks chose a different path, placing their broadcasts exclusively on Prime Video plus select over-the-air games.

Fubo's agreement adds a vMVPD to that list: a service that resells bundles of live linear channels over the internet rather than over cable plant it owns. According to its release, FuboTV Inc. is the second-largest vMVPD and the sixth-largest pay-TV company in the United States, based on UBS estimates.

The exclusivity question

Here the documents do not quite line up. Prime Video's September 2 rights were described as exclusive in-market streaming, and the Blues called Prime Video their exclusive local market streaming provider. Fubo is, by its own description, a streaming service. Neither Fubo's release nor the September 2 materials explain how the two coexist.

The plausible distinction is that Prime Video holds exclusivity over direct-to-consumer streaming of the games, while Fubo carries a linear channel as a pay-TV distributor, in the same way Spectrum does. That reading would be consistent with the Blues' September list of pending cable, satellite and over-the-air agreements. But the Blues did not name internet-delivered pay TV in that list, and no party has spelled the distinction out publicly. Until one does, the boundary between an exclusive streaming right and a streamed pay-TV channel rests on contract language that has not been published.

Amazon's relationship with the league is broader than these six clubs. In Canada, Prime Video took exclusive Wednesday night national NHL games for 12 years under a sublicence from Rogers, starting this season.

Fubo's regional sports ledger

The NHL deal extends a pattern that has run through 2026. Fubo brought Spectrum SportsNet LA and more than 140 Los Angeles Dodgers games to its base plan on March 26, the first time the platform had carried the Dodgers. On June 10, its agreement with NBCUniversal restored four NBC Sports regional networks covering the Bay Area, Boston, California and Philadelphia; the same article recorded the company's claim to agreements covering 17 professional baseball teams, giving it home-team baseball coverage across 99% of the country by its own figures. Standalone access arrived earlier still, when the Fubo Channel Store opened on November 5, 2025 with direct-to-consumer plans from several regional sports networks that required no base subscription.

Whether the four NHL channels will be sold that way is one more point the release does not address.

The corporate context has also shifted. Fubo and Hulu + Live TV completed their combination on October 29, 2025, leaving Disney with roughly 70% of the merged company. That merger ended an antitrust fight Fubo had brought against Disney, Fox Corporation and Warner Bros. Discovery. In July 2026, Alisa Bowen replaced co-founder David Gandler as chief executive.

Carriage costs and the path to $300 million

Programming is the company's largest expense, and every regional network added to a footprint carries a cost. In the quarter ended March 31, 2026, FuboTV Inc. recorded subscriber related expenses of $946.7 million and related-party subscriber expenses of $499 million against global revenue of $1.574 billion. Its plan to reach at least $300 million in Adjusted EBITDA by fiscal 2028 relies heavily on contractual wholesale fee step-ups rather than subscriber growth alone, and fiscal 2026 Pro Forma Adjusted EBITDA guidance was revised upward to a range of $90 million to $100 million in August.

How the NHL prices these channels to Fubo is unknown. The Spectrum deals, as reported, pay the clubs per subscriber; nothing in today's release says whether the Fubo agreement follows the same model, or whether the four channels sit in a base tier where every in-market subscriber generates a fee.

Scale is the other variable. North America paid subscribers stood at 5.75 million at June 30, 2026, up from 5.63 million a year earlier but below the 6.18 million recorded at December 31, 2025. The wider virtual distribution market has stopped growing on autopilot. MoffettNathanson counted 21.33 million vMVPD subscribers in the United States at the end of the first quarter of 2026, after the category shed 948,000 subscribers in that quarter. For a distributor in that position, keeping home-team hockey in four markets is a retention argument as much as an acquisition one - and Mathers' language about subscribers who "can continue to enjoy their favorite local teams" points in that direction.

Who sells the advertising?

For media buyers, the harder question concerns inventory. In the traditional MVPD model, carriage agreements set a per-subscriber affiliate fee, tier placement and term, and distributors typically receive an allocated share of commercial time within the networks they carry. Today's release is silent on advertising. None of the documents reviewed for this article - the Fubo release, the NHL's July statement, the September 2 Prime Video materials or the reporting on the Spectrum agreements - identifies who sells national or local commercial time inside the NHL-produced telecasts, or whether Fubo receives an allocation.

On Fubo's own side of the ledger, the sales structure is settled. After the merger, Fubo's advertising sales group moved into Disney's advertising organisation, and its inventory migrated to the Disney Ad Server. The quarter ended June 30, 2026 was the first full period on that system, producing advertising revenue of $108.9 million against a pro forma $109.4 million a year earlier, even as the company cited improved fill rates and CPMs. Results published in May disclosed Disney's plan to include Fubo in its annual upfront presentation, placing the inventory alongside ESPN, Hulu, ABC and Disney+. Mediaocean's Prisma Direct, slated to go live in the third quarter of 2026, includes Fubo inventory through an API built on the same technology as Disney Campaign Manager.

Demand for live sport is not the constraint. Magnite said on September 3 that live sports ad spend rose 56% year over year between January and July, with more than 5,800 advertisers new to live sports inventory; the figures are the company's own. Discovery is a larger problem. Gracenote research published on September 1 found that 26% of sports fans are frequently unable to locate a specific game, with the United States at 26.2%. A Blues fan in St. Louis can now choose between a $19.99 Prime Video add-on, a Spectrum cable tier, a pending over-the-air arrangement and a Fubo subscription, each carrying some subset of the same 84-game schedule. Every additional route extends reach, but it also divides one team's audience across several services, which complicates any attempt to count it.

Politics hangs over the arrangement too. On September 14, Netflix, Amazon and YouTube formed the Streaming Access and Choice Alliance in Washington as legislators pushed for rules favouring free access to live sport, including a bill from Senator Tammy Baldwin that would require free, single-location access to local teams' games. The NHL's mix of paid streaming, cable, virtual pay TV and a handful of free over-the-air simulcasts sits squarely inside that debate.

For now, the practical result is narrower. Starting this season, the four clubs that lost their regional channels have a fourth named distribution partner, and Fubo has four more networks in its lineup. What they cost, how many subscribers can see them and who sells the breaks inside them remain undisclosed.

Timeline

Summary

Who: FuboTV Inc., the Disney-affiliated owner of Fubo, Hulu + Live TV and Molotov, and the National Hockey League, with statements from Todd Mathers, executive vice president of content strategy and acquisition at Fubo, and David Proper, chief media officer of the NHL. The four clubs covered are the Carolina Hurricanes, Columbus Blue Jackets, Minnesota Wild and St. Louis Blues.

What: A multi-year distribution agreement under which the Fubo streaming service will carry four NHL-produced regional sports networks to subscribers in each club's market. Channel names, game counts, plan placement, pricing, financial terms and advertising arrangements were not disclosed, and Hulu + Live TV is not mentioned.

When: The agreement was disclosed today, one day before the NHL's 84-game 2026-27 regular season opens on September 29. It follows Prime Video's in-market streaming agreement on September 2 and reported Spectrum cable deals on September 23.

Where: The United States, limited to the home markets of the four clubs in the Carolinas, Columbus, Minnesota and St. Louis.

Why: The four clubs lost their regional television home when Main Street Sports Group's FanDuel Sports Network ceased operations after the 2025-26 season, and the NHL now produces and distributes their telecasts itself. For Fubo, the channels keep home-team hockey in four markets as the company works toward a $300 million Adjusted EBITDA target. For advertisers, the arrangement splits the same games across Prime Video, cable, over-the-air and virtual pay TV, while leaving unanswered who sells the commercial time inside the new feeds.