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I feel like the NFL is maybe leaving money on the table here, and is too greedy and out of touch to even see it. I could be wrong, but I bet if they charged, say, $5 to watch any out-of-market game the customer wants, they would make a killing.
Instead, they charge like $400 or something for all of the out-of-market games. Most people aren't going to pay that much. Especially if they only care about one team that's out of their area.
NFL broadcasting has always been an absurd money grab (for instance from 1973 through 2014, a home game could not be televised in the team's local market if 85 percent of the tickets were not sold out 72 hours before the starting time of the match) and the internet/streaming only made it worse.
I remember my dad being so pissed about this! I'm 48 and think that I've heard more games than I've watched. By a lot, probably.
I watch NFL from the UK where none of this applies, you can get a subscription service that covers all games. I went to my friend's house to watch it once, but his TV didn't have the right app so I went to cast it from my phone. The app blocked casting. Maybe watch it from a laptop with HDMI? Also didn't work.
We pirate now.
My dad pays for the NFL.com package and YouTubeTV (not premium, and even more expensive package than that) so he can watch all the games. I dread every season because of the inevitable bitching about one or both services.
He has an elastic band he puts up to block the score ticker on the bottom of the screen, and he's constantly terrified that they'll cut away from the current game for an update on another one he hasn't watched yet.
I feel like there's a real market for the old Red Zone channel that DirectTV used to do. No commercials, no breaks, just snap, play until the whistle, then fast forward to the next snap. It only showed gameplay when one of the teams was in the red zone(hence the name), but I bet people like my dad would pay enough to offset the lost ad revenue if they covered the whole game like that.
It was probably easier than any official way and cheaper.
I feel like sports leagues are going to have to figure out how to break up streaming rights across multiple streamers. Maybe make a single team stream while allowing for the overall rights to be fragmented.