Legacy broadcast contracts are a huge problem here. I only care about hockey, but NHL.tv is a complete mess from an audience perspective.
$120 a year theoretically gets you streaming for the regular season.
Unless you're considered in-market for the team you want to watch, in which case, the games are blacked out for you since they're available on regional sports channels.
So say you live out-of-market from the team you want to watch. Great! Now you can stream all the games live... unless it happens to be broadcast on national TV, in which case you get blacked out.
It's literally impossible to give the league money and watch all the games you want to see without also having cable and it's all because of the tangled mess of agreements with regional cable channels.
I just watch everything on dvr. I've managed to make it most of the NFL season only knowing about 4 total scores. Like I think the bucs beat the hawks last week. And I live in seattle and have a fantasy team.
I watch all of the baseball cardinals games at work. I'm often up to 3 weeks behind. This is easier as I'm out of market. But it's not that hard. I used to unfollow people on twitter who thought tweeting scores was somthing I'd care about. And I stopped using google news because it thinks who died on Game of Thrones or who won a game as news. It's even worse because it sees you looking at articles about them and zeroes in the news for you.
Other than that the only issue is catching back up on baseball. There are so. many. games.
The NFL is ahead of the curve here. Their streaming option for me as a non-US person is amazing. It's not cheap (250 Euro iirc) but it's also a ton better than normal games. Since I have no spoilers here as NFL results aren't even reported my usual NFL watching is:
RedZone (simulcast) for the batch of early games on Sunday which is roughly 19h-22h over here. Then watch the remaining Sunday games, including SNF on Monday in their cut down all snaps only version (about 45 minutes each compared to the normal 3.5h) and the MNF game on Tuesday (TNF on Friday or Saturday usually). If need be that can be shifted back a day (Sunday Redzone on Monday etc.)
All games archived and reviewable, All22 perspective is also nice to do some analyzing every now and then. The bundle includes Playoffs and the SB and some other stuff. I usually also watch Hard Knocks before the season for example.
And, their streaming technology is pretty standard (granted, woven through an odd maze of servers) and stable. Because of that, I and a few others were able to write an addon that lets subscribers access it from within Kodi. The lack of interface lock-in is nice.
With a few caveats, GamePass has done it the right way.
It's ironic that here in Germany I get better access to football content than I ever did in the US.
This has been said elsewhere but both GamePass and NHL.tv are good unless you want to watch local teams. Which of course is the primary desire of anyone who's a cord cutter (like me). I'm sure they are prohibited from providing local streams by the contracts they have already agreed to. Here is how bad those contracts can apparently be: here in Boston you can listen to NFL games on the radio, but if you try and stream that same radio station over the internet while a game is going on, it's blacked out.
The contract structure is totally unsuited to the internet-using public. Sooner or later the situation will change due to cord cutters. When it does happen, my bet is that the leagues will have to accept an overall decrease in available revenue. Player salaries will descend. The revenue of these enterprises probably peaked a couple of years ago. And like with newspapers, the product will need to change.
I just wanted to say "Thanks!" I'm a happy user of your extension for Kodi. I use it here in the US, and wait until after the 2nd games have ended (~20:00EST) to watch my out-of-market team.
Tickets to professional sporting events have provisions stating you can be ejected for recording the event. While these are basically never enforced, I could see trying to stream the entire game be a good reason for the venue to start enforcing it.
Similarly, the broadcasts of sporting events have a disclaimer saying you can't rebroadcast or retransmit it in any way, but I have no idea if that is legally binding.
