I've been an NFL Sunday Ticket subscriber for a few years, ever since I learned that you could subscribe without DirecTV service if you live in an apartment, but I'm thinking of cancelling this year.

The price was already outrageous given the number of games which are blacked out. There were plenty of times when I couldn't watch the games I wanted to at all, because they were blacked out for me on NFLST even though they weren't airing on a local station.

I'm sure the tech will be better under Google, but their video player was absolutely dreadful. Any time the HLS streaming bitrate changed (which it did every time you selected a different game), the audio stream would change and emit this screeching sound. And lord help you if you decided to switch from watching it on one device to another, because it was entirely likely that the service would decide that you were trying to share passwords and lock both devices out for like 15 minutes.

I don't personally pirate NFL streams, but I know people who do and the quality of their viewing experience is far above people who pay for NFLST. Sunday Ticket is the prime example of how having a total monopoly leads to a barely functioning and exorbitantly priced product.