Comment by kstrauser
5 hours ago
I love it. I’m willing to pay for streaming sports services, to a point, but all of them are freaking insane. For example, my wife and I like watching baseball. So let’s do the right thing and pay for it, right? LOL, as if that were possible. For $120[0] we can watch the Giants games, or for $220, all games… but subject to blackout. For $120, we can’t actually watch home games. We’d have to pay for a separate streaming service for those.
It’s similar for NFL, and I assume NHL and NBA, too. I’d pay to watch the stuff I watch if it were possible, but it’s not!
The NBA is similarly annoying. It's $110 for the season to watch all non-blacked out games. As a Knicks fan, it was great when I was living in Philly because I could watch all Knicks games unless they were nationally broadcast or if they were playing the Sixers. Now that I live in NJ I'm technically in the NY broadcast region. The only way for me to watch local games legally is to have MSG through a cable provider or pay for Gotham Sports Plus which is $35/month.
Sport streaming is the one where I don't feel bad about using unofficial services, they are reasonably priced, I can watch the broadcast of the country that I prefer (Sky UK over the German coverage for example) and I can use an app like https://www.uhfapp.com which is more polished and works better than all the official streaming apps combined.
NHL is similarly frustrating. I pay for ESPN but some games are on TNT, NHL Network, or a broadcast channel. I'm not paying for two different $60 a month services so now they just don't get any of my money.
for NFL it hugely depends on whether you want to follow the local team. So far, if you're in the local market the NFL generally shows the games on broadcast for free, and that you can get to with an antenna and a TV card depending on where you are.
MLB, I haven't tried for a few years but I could watch any out of market game on mlb.tv, but not any that involved the local team, so it was the opposite. For that there was a special regional sports channel that I'd have to subscribe to. No way to do it directly with the network, I'd have to get satellite or something.
> for NFL it hugely depends on whether you want to follow the local team.
That's the situation for probably 95% of viewers, though. Others might want to watch games from where they grew up, but most people typically follow the local teams. We don't even have a great way to get an antenna feed into our TV, and that also means we have one way to watch everything except local games, and another, worse way to watch them (for example, by not having a way to pause them).
I get why the streaming apps don't show local games from their business POV, but as a potential subscriber, that's a them-problem, not a me-problem. There's no way I'm paying that much money without being able to watch the home games.
Not sure which streaming apps you're referring to. If you only care about the local team, getting a TV streaming option like Youtube TV, sling or hulu tv should work. Probably some I'm not thinking of. As long as they get the main networks, that should cover it. Even when they do a Prime exclusive or MNF(espn) game, they'll show it on the local affiliate for local markets. At least that's the way it has always worked, NFL may change it in the future. The real pain is if you want to follow an out of market team. Just for starters you need NFL Sunday ticket which is not cheap these days.
If you're cool waiting a day to watch the games, nfl plus has everything with commercials cut.
2 replies →
I believe for $120 you can watch sold out home games. Or like you said "we can’t actually watch home games"