With a crowd of streaming services taking over television, it is hard to find where to see your favorite teams play. In the past, all you had to worry about was what channel it was on, and if you wanted to see more than just the local team, then you would pay your TV provider more for it, and that was that. Now, you have to pay for several different streaming services and multiple upgrades, just to watch all of the games for one team.
For example, the Carolina Hurricanes, which should be an easy team to watch, requires a Fanduel Sports Network subscription, which requires a subscription to a participating TV provider. Even if you were to purchase these subscriptions, you only get a percentage of the total games.
This is fine for most fans, but for those that are a lot more devoted, you also have to buy a subscription to ESPN Plus to see the remaining games, which adds a lot of extra money.
Carolina Panthers fans should be ready to face similar problems as Hurricanes fans. With the Panthers, you need to upgrade most TV provider plans to include the NFL Network, which adds a lot to an already large TV bill.
The last of the North Carolina professional sports teams are the Charlotte Hornets. Luckily, they also use Fanduel Sports Network, but, similarly to the Hurricanes, they need you to subscribe to another service to get the remainder of the games that Fanduel does not have. The Hornets use NBA League Pass, which fills in the would-be gaps left by Fanduel, at another extra cost.
NBA League Pass is expensive, just like its NHL and NFL counterparts, and adds yet another layer of complexity to the already hefty bill, just to watch the local professional sports teams.
This is all assuming that you only like North Carolina’s teams because if you follow any non-local teams, you are in for a world of pain.
The NFL uses four more services to stream out-of-market games for all long-distance fans. These are Hulu Plus, Paramount Plus, NFL Sunday Ticket and newly, Netflix. All of these add even more cost and confusion for fans nationwide.
The NHL and NBA are a lot more straightforward, using ESPN Plus and their respective streaming services to give their viewers easier access to games than those who watch the NFL.
All of this comes down to money, as each of these streaming services cost upwards of $100 each per year, which means that it can cost over $700 to watch all of the sports fans enjoy, and the leagues make millions selling out to streaming services, leaving fans left to pick up this enormous bill.
With all of this, there isn’t a lot that the average Joe sports fan can do. Big corporations all trade and sell the rights to broadcast sporting events like they are trading cards, with no regard for fans. They either have to pay or not watch the games.
