The NFL’s Streaming Scheme Makes Watching Football Insufferable And Nearly Impossible
Like any good American, I prefer to spend my fall and winter weekends watching the best sport of all time. Thanks to streaming fragmentation, however, tuning into even a few of the biggest and best football games has become a ridiculous, remote-fumbling, and expensive feat.
The problem posed by the splicing and dicing of desirable TV and movie content is certainly not limited to football. Yet the ramifications of that fracturing are felt most by pigskin fanatics who, between college and professional game schedules, expect to tune into their favorite sport five days a week.
The NFL’s foray into the mess that onscreen entertainment has become can be traced back to 2021, when the NFL finalized an 11-year media distribution agreement that, starting in 2023, auctioned off thousands of games to various TV and streaming networks.
The league pitched the move as the best way to “reach a broader audience.” Over a year into the agreement, though, it’s clear that selling games’ media rights to what feels like a billion different networks and streaming apps has become a channel-flipping nightmare for the at-home audience keeping the league’s TV prominence alive.
The NFL website boasts 18 cable TV networks and streaming services fans can use to tune into games. Not a single one of those, however, promises access to all 272 regular-season face-offs.
Instead, a typical week of viewing for professional football fans and fantasy managers alike requires subscriptions to several streaming apps and the sanity to remember which one is showing games when.
Thursday Night Football airs on Amazon Prime. Sunday day games are spread out a little more between Fox Sports, Paramount+, and the NFL’s streaming options, making live-TV streaming bundles offered by platforms like YouTube TV potentially worth the ever-increasing price. Viewers who stick around to watch the big Sunday evening event, on the other hand, have to flip the channel to NBC or sign into Peacock. On Monday, all of the action can be found on ESPN.
Fans who shell out for NFL+, which offers a “combination of live local and primetime mobile games” for $6.99 a month or $49.99 a season, get access to a good chunk of these games. Yet even NFL+ subscribers miss out on the matchups played and aired outside of their market region.
Less than $10 bucks on a couple of your favorite streaming services here and there doesn’t sound like a bad deal if you’re tired of paying for cable and you like the content those platforms put out. Spending $7 on the more than half a dozen streaming packages (many laden with viewing-limiting caveats such as a subscriber’s location), however, makes the olden days of paying for all-you-can-watch games on cable look like a cakewalk.
Perhaps the NFL’s streaming scheme wouldn’t be so bad if viewers could split the price of Amazon Prime, Paramount+, Peacock, and other subscriptions with friends and family. As streaming costs rise and crackdowns on password sharing intensify, though, the likelihood that any one household will get to watch NFL games for less than a few hundred bucks a year is low if not impossible.
Paying to watch NFL games from home is still certainly cheaper (and warmer) than buying tickets to see them in person. Streaming fragmentation, unfortunately, puts a huge damper on the comforts of couch coaching.
The NFL is rigged, but not for the Kansas City Chiefs. It is rigged against the league’s loyal fans who are milked for money thanks to a myriad of media distribution agreements.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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