On Tuesday March 3rd, the Canadian Elite Basketball League (CEBL) announced that they had reached a deal with the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) to have their games be broadcasted on their platforms for the next five years. This is a return to the network as both companies had a broadcast deal during the first few years of the league’s existence. With the CEBL’s deal being finished with the Toronto Sports Network (TSN), and having finished last season with uncertainty, it is good to see the league find a new partner. While this deal with CBC will have its positives, just like the one with TSN, there will also be some drawbacks. TSN may have been the largest company with the possibility of growing the CEBL viewer base exponentially. Unfortunately it did not seem that TSN wanted much to do with the league, especially towards the end.

With this new broadcast deal, seeing as CBC will have all games on their streaming service CBC Gem and the CBC Sports Youtube channel, not to mention CBC TV having marquee matchups, where does this leave CEBL+? The leagues streaming platform has been in service since 2021 and has seen its fair share of changes. It began as a paid service, then after some uproar from fans, it is now a free platform. It currently streams all games, along with having some extra content that the league puts out about the teams. It is also the only place that the extended highlights for games is released. It is clear there had been a considerable drop in advertisement for the platform, and while they emphasized it would still be available this summer, what is the reasoning? It does not currently provide any other value outside of simply being another place to watch games. As a reader, where do you feel you’ll watch the games the most? Many have said online that they created a Gem account to watch the 2026 Winter Olympics, which they will continue to use to watch games this summer. YouTube is already a popular platform for many to use, so where does this put CEBL+?

If the league wants to make the service relevant for the foreseeable future, they need to create some sort of exclusive content just for the platform, giving users a reason to want to continue using it. It could be different broadcast crews, angles, or even just more behind the scenes content that they’ve done before. Anything would be better than what they currently have on deck. There has not been an official announcement as to what the plans are for the platform, if there even are any. But it’s been made clear that it’s sticking around for 2026. After that, I do wonder if they’ll scrap the project.