Football season is almost upon us. That means one thing: expensive cable or satellite TV packages. Okay, it also means beer commercials and overpriced stadium tickets and quarterbacks trying to sell you car insurance. But in terms of immediate costs, premium TV is up there.
If you’re part of the online-only cordcutting trend, sports can be a real pain. Luckily, the last few years have seen a rapid expansion in live TV streaming services. Even so, getting access to the major NFL football partners takes a bit of research and legwork.
Our goal is to spend the least amount of money possible to get as many NFL games as we can, without signing up for conventional cable or satellite TV, signing a contract, or having to buy or rent specific hardware. For the sake of this comparison, we’re also ignoring over-the-air HD broadcasts that can be watched free with an antenna—though that’s an excellent way to watch football, too. We want to be able to stream all or nearly all NFL games, to desktop browsers, mobile devices, and streaming set-top boxes like Roku, for the absolute cheapest possible amount of money.
Which TV Networks Do You Need?
In the United States, NFL football games are broadcast every Sunday on over-the-air networks, every Monday night on ESPN’s Monday Night Football, and every Thursday on NFL Network (cable), CBS (broadcast), or NBC (broadcast). Some 2017 games are also available to stream through Amazon.com. There are also some intermittent games on other days of the week, but generally, you’ll be able to tune in almost all Sunday and on Monday and Thursday nights to find a game.
To get the widest possible selection, we want the following channels accessible for streaming:
Broadcast
- ABC
- NBC
- FOX
- CBS
Premium
- ESPN
- NFL Network
Note that on Sundays, when many football games overlap, you may be limited to the game chosen for your specific region by your local network affiliate. Blackout games for local teams are also possibilities if the stadium doesn’t sell enough seats, but those are unlikely. It seems probable that the NFL will suspend blackouts entirely for 2017, as it has for the 2015 and 2016 seasons, though that has not been confirmed at the time of writing.
The CBS Problem
In the current streaming world, CBS is like that kid in kindergarten who refuses to play with others and throws a screaming temper tantrum when the teacher tells him to share. While ABC, NBC, and FOX are all available on at least some collective streaming services, CBS is not, forcing customers to pay for its stand-alone CBS All Access service or sign up with a partner like Hulu. Even then, it’s only available in select cities. So it’s more or less impossible to get all six of the broadcast and streaming networks we listed above in a single paid streaming package.
That means we’re going to have to combine CBS All Access with some of the other streaming TV services in order to get access to everything. The good news is, since none of these services require a contract or extra hardware, you can drop CBS All Access like a bad habit once the football season is over.
Local Channels…
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