How to watch Nuggets, Avalanche games

Kroenke Sports & Entertainment has solved its Comcast problem.

Nuggets and Avalanche games will soon be available via a paid-subscription streaming service, with select games also set to be broadcast over-the-air on Denver’s KUSA-9 and KTVD-20, KSE announced Thursday morning.

The company plans to debut a streaming service called Altitude+ in October, when both teams begin their 2024-25 seasons. All games not televised on a national network will be available to stream. Subscriptions will cost $19.95 per month ($239.40 per year).

A total of 20 Nuggets games and 20 Avs games will be televised over the air for free on My20 (KTVD-20). Ten of those games will also air on KUSA-9, the Denver-area NBC affiliate.

The news comes five years into a carriage dispute between Comcast and Altitude Sports, the Kroenke-owned regional sports network, that blacked out Nuggets and Avalanche games for Comcast subscribers.

Altitude Sports and its game broadcasts have been available as a channel on DirecTV, Fubo and Spectrum TV. They still will be — but now a combination of streaming and over-the-air broadcasts will give fans another avenue to bypass Comcast.

The Altitude+ application will be available for download on Apple and Android devices before a smart TV version of the app is released. Subscriptions will include access to pregame and postgame coverage, as well as the network’s standard college coverage of Colorado State, Air Force and the University of Denver.

Nuggets and Avs games televised over the air on 9News and My20 will be produced by Altitude Sports with the same talent, including Nuggets play-by-play announcer Chris Marlowe and Avalanche play-by-play announcer Marc Moser.

The contractual dispute between KSE and Comcast coincided with widespread strife for regional sports networks and a revolution in live sports streaming. Other sports franchises previously established the standard for pivoting away from RSNs in favor of the two-pronged approach KSE is now adopting: old-school broadcast TV combined with new-school, self-started subscription services.

The dispute has also coincided with an unprecedented era of success on the ice and on the hardwood for the teams owned by billionaire Stan Kroenke. The Avalanche won the Stanley Cup in 2022. The Nuggets followed with their first NBA championship in franchise history in 2023. Avs center Nathan MacKinnon and Nuggets center Nikola Jokic both won the most valuable player award in their respective leagues in 2024 — the first time that the NBA and NHL’s MVP winners have hailed from the same city since Magic Johnson and Wayne Gretzky in 1989.

The excellence of MacKinnon and Jokic was perpetually at arm’s length from local sports fans, however. In November 2019, Altitude filed a lawsuit against Comcast after its carriage deal lapsed two months earlier, accusing Colorado’s largest cable provider of violating antitrust laws. The lawsuit was settled in March 2023, but the two sides remained at a contract impasse, keeping Nuggets and Avalanche games blacked out on the cable provider’s platform.

Sports Business Journal’s John Ourand reported in February 2022 that Altitude registered an NBA-worst 0.19 rating in the Denver market — the lowest TV number recorded in any pro hoops market for nearly two decades. In February 2024, Matt Hutchings, the KSE executive who had overseen Altitude, resigned. He was replaced the next month by Kevin Demoff, who swiftly acknowledged streaming and over-the-air television as possible paths forward in his introductory news conference.

“When I joined KSE last March, I said the most important thing we can do with Altitude Sports is give it a fresh perspective so that our fans can see our amazing teams and the generational players we are fortunate to have here in Denver,” Demoff said in a statement included in Thursday’s release. “Thanks to the leadership and support of Stan and Josh, our team was able to develop this unique model giving our fans an opportunity to watch all Nuggets and Avs games in a variety of ways. I want to thank all of our distribution partners for working with us to come up with a creative solution to get Altitude Sports to our fans.”

Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.

Originally Published: September 26, 2024 at 7:00 a.m.