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Watching every NFL game costs around $2,500 and requires six logins. And other leagues are going to follow this model.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/want-to-watch-every-nfl-ga...

I'm not sure we should expect other leagues to follow suit. Unlike other leagues, the NFL is intentionally trying to make it difficult to watch their games to protect ticket sales. It probably doesn't make sense as a strategy for less popular sports that need to get people interested in the first place.

Not sure I follow. The local NFL team's game is on free TV, over the air. People pay or resort to piracy to watch the better game that's four states away. You have to subscribe to see one-off games in England, or subscribe to Netflix to watch the games on Christmas Day.

If you want to protect ticket sales, don't make the price of tickets astronomically high. Then, once at the stadium, make parking cheaper than $90. Make concessions affordable too. At that point, you'll have buts in seats at every game. Owner greed is why ticket sales even need this so called "protection"

That’s a feature. It’s like Broadcom increasing the price of VMWare. They only want rich customers.

At some point you price out an entire generation and find they've moved on to something else like e-sports.

> Watching every NFL game costs around $2,500 and requires six logins. And other leagues are going to follow this model.

That sounds very over the top, but I don't know enough about the US, NFL or TV to dispute that.

For La Liga (or F1/MotoGP for that matter) you can at least get away with a ~30 EUR/month subscription to see the games, with various providers. Is there really not one network broadcasting/streaming all the games somewhere?

Nope! The NFL has a long tradition of splitting off games into their own categories: most games are played on Sunday in the afternoon and are carried on the “big 4” networks in the US, then there are 1 or 2 games each on Sunday Night, Monday, and Thursday. To be clear: these are all regular season games, just at different timings.

The rights to each “day” of games then get sold off separately. So right now Thursday games are on Prime, Monday games are on ESPN+, and Sunday Night games are on Peacock. Generally the steaming services want to use the games as an onboarding tool, so they are not available anywhere else and you have to subscribe to their whole streaming service, not just the games.

There is a service called “NFL Sunday Ticket” but it only lets you watch the games that aren’t available to you in some other way (so if it’s on Prime it’s not on NFL Sunday Ticket for anyone and if it’s on old-school antenna broadcast it’s not on NFL Sunday Ticket if the broadcast is too close to you).

To watch all of the NFL games you’ll need:

- Prime

- ESPN+

- Peacock

- Cable/Antenna/Fubo/YouTube TV (for home-team Sunday games)

- NFL Sunday Ticket (for other Sunday games)

(Or you can just pirate them, which is cheap and easy.)

Sunday night games are also on NBC.

FWIW Monday night games are available on standard ESPN and, sometimes, ABC and Sunday night games are on NBC. So you don't strictly speaking need Peacock or ESPN+

But this Christmas Day you will also need Netflix if you want to watch the Texans game with Beyonce half time show. Not usre about the other Christmas Day game.

I have ESPN+ and could not watch Monday's game, it was only on ESPN and I didn't have a cable subscription.

This situation is a real mess when you being in international rights too - eg F1TV largely doesn’t operate in F1’s biggest markets as the rights to live broadcast are still owned by existing cable/satellite networks.

>That sounds very over the top

because watching every single NFL game is over the top. people watch their team's games, and maybe whatever else is on if their team isn't playing. they don't watch every game ever. except for a few hardcore weirdos, and $2500 is a reasable price to pay if you're that into it.

streaming rights are a mess, and there's certainly room for it to be a lot more user-friendly. but watching every single game isn't a useful metric.

I'm not sure when the NFL started doing this but you can now watch highlights from seemingly every game on YT. These highlight reels are edited quite well, capturing the significant moments of each game.

I'm not much of a football fan, really only following my local team and one other. But now I watch the highlights of almost every other game on YT.

Watching every single thing on Netflix is also literally impossible, and it doesn't cost $2,500 to try.

Supercars for AU$9.99/month or AU$99/year.

https://www.supercars.com/superview

International sports are similar. The EPL is spread across Peacock, NBC, USA/Telemundo. There are days I have to resort to watching a Spanish broadcast of a match because whatever strained logic NBC has used on what games to make available where. Assuming this is in an attempt to drive viewers to dying cable channels??? It's extremely frustrating

> International sports are similar

I'm not so sure. I can easily get access to all La Liga matches for waay less than ~$2,500, and the same goes for most non-American sports I care to watch sometimes. I was even surprised how easy it was to get HBO Max to watch every single Olympic event this year, think it cost 15-20 EUR in total or something. For reference, this is for a Spanish resident, so YMMV.

I said similar in that it is split across multiple places. You need a sub to Peacock. You need a cable sub to get USA. You need an antenna or cable to get NBC. While these don't approach the same $2500, there is no single place to go to watch the matches.

I think it’s just the sheer size and appetite of top dogs like the premier league.

La Liga and Bundesliga are both on ESPN+ in a single sub, all Serie A and Champions League matches are on Paramount+, all MLS matches are on Apple+, etc.

Please more leagues just give me a reasonably priced service to get all the games. In the US, the full F1 season is $90. The full MLB season can be had for about $100 if you buy it on sale. I got last season for $40 by waiting until June. I don't generally follow such a long season until about then anyway. College football is about all I'm missing. That still requires a cable/streaming sub. I can wait until March and do a one month sub to get my college basketball fix. I pay for Peacock every July for Le Tour.

NBA is dead to me. NHL is fine but not worth paying for. Not a big NFL fan and I'd buy MLS if it were unbundled from AppleTV+. I'm not paying for both.

Just one man's opinion.

This stat is disingenuous.

1. $2500 is one year of cable + streaming services required to watch every football game. If you don’t have cable it’s $1700.

2. $1700 is the cost to maintain all of those services year round; the regular season + playoffs is 5 months long

It’s probably more like $800, which is still a lot, especially when they’re already monetizing the product by shoving ads down our throats every 30 seconds (though it’s a different “they”)

NFL puts some of the full games on Youtube a day or two later.

Sports teams and orgs like FIFA are ruthlessly effective at extracting every last cent of value from sports broadcasting rights, to the point it's not profitable for broadcasters/streamers other than ESPN (and even the latter's profitability, once the mainstay of Disney profits, is collapsing). It's a mug's game to play, yet suckers are seemingly born every day, as with Netflix paying

Why would they? Sports fans need to watch their teams, they will pay whatever they can afford to do so. This is different from Spotify/Netflix, where you don't really need to watch some movie or listen to music (which you can do for free on the radio). And particularly, with those services you don't need to listen/watch it live.

Why would they lower their profits? Even services like YouTube TV eventually catch up in price with regular cable.

> Why would they lower their profits?

Because doing so is likely to make the total profits $0 in the future as it makes each generation less interested than their parents were.

> This is different from Spotify/Netflix, where you don't really need to watch some movie or listen to music

It’s kinda the same though. If I want to watch Interstellar, I won’t settle for Gravity because it’s what Netflix has. If I want to watch Interstellar and it’s not on Netflix or Prime Video, I’m going to pirate it.

Spotify and the music industry are better, but I don't think the TV and movie industries are much better than sports. Look at this official guide of where to watch Pokemon, it looks like satire.

https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

This is maybe the most obvious example but ridiculous things like seasons of TV shows being split across different streaming services is incredibly common.

I really don't care about watching millionaires play for billionaires, or indentured servitude college students making billions for the NCAA. College sports are a whole other racket that has destroyed our schools

> or indentured servitude college students making billions for the NCAA

That's no longer the case. NIL is paying out hundreds of thousands to millions for 18-21 year olds in College Football[0] (don't know how much other sports get, but they get paid too) unless they are in a state that bans it (not sure if there are still hold outs) or the military academies, but they are a different breed entirely. It's basically minor league pro football now.

[0] https://collegefootballnetwork.com/top-10-nil-deals-in-2024/

>I really don't care about watching millionaires play for billionaires

I take it that you also don't watch any scripted TV shows or movies either? "millionaire (actors) acting for billionaires (producers/production companies)" is a reasonably accurate description of how such programming are produced as well.

Are you advocating that these sports follow professional wrestling, switching from being sporting events to scripted entertainment? Or that this has already happened?

No, the point is that if you object to professional sports on the basis that it's "watching millionaires play for billionaires", then to be consistent you should also object to scripted television/movies, which can have the same objection levied against it. That's not to say you can't prefer sports over scripted television/movies, just that you can't use that excuse to hate on former and but still claim to enjoy the latter.

For the NHL, I would pay more for the pirate streaming setup I have than I would for SportsNet in Canada. The only thing they have to do to get money from me is offer a product that isn’t absolute trash.