Imagine being able to pay a single fee to one service provider who would grant you the ability to watch whatever you wanted to, especially sports. Sounds great, right? That was cable television. A flawed, hopeless contraption that should have been improved upon. Instead, it has been replaced by better technology which has produced worse results. Streaming has ruined watching sports. Here’s what happened.
Why streaming has ruined watching sports
March 19, 2010. Even today, I vividly remember what happened on this very nondescript date in history. I had finished up my History of the Nation-State class, which was totally awesome, and plopped down at one of the tables that faced a window overlooking the University of Idaho campus.
It was close to 5 pm and while I intended to do some homework, that didn’t happen as it rarely does in college. On this occasion, I somehow stumbled upon the fact that all you needed to watch games on ESPN360, the precursor to ESPN3 and ESPN+, was an internet subscription or an email address that ended in .edu. I had both.
On a glorious evening in Moscow, Idaho with the sun setting behind the Kibbie Dome, I watched a meaningless NBA game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Chicago Bulls. Look, it wasn’t perfect. The stream was 360p but given the screen resolution on my HP Omnibook 6000 with its external wireless card, that didn’t matter. Shout out to that amazing computer I bought on Craigslist for $80 and used for three years.
The takeaway from this experience, at least for me, was that streaming sports was awesome and only going to get better. I could finally watch what I wanted to watch, wherever I happened to be. This, of course, was an incredible time for internet technologies in general.
Facebook was a place for you and your friends. Twitter was a platform used by those who understood how to only use it and, by 2010, sports was a click away. We were so naïve. Fast forward to 2023 and things are not nearly as good. Your Facebook feed is basically a digital version of the Pennysaver that might steal your personal information, the less said about Twitter the better and streaming has ruined sports.
We all know the situation as it stands. Sports streaming is a fragmented, disjointed, user-unfriendly mess. You need a bunch of different app subscriptions plus cable to watch the various events during the year. This is the equivalent of being allowed to buy all the parts to build a car, but not having a company willing to build the damn thing.
How did we even get here? Cord cutting was supposed to free us from onerous cable packages and make everything better.
Instead, Netflix now requires us to have a permanent residence, a cord, if you will. Beyond that, you have all these other players that have siphoned off enough of the sports content pie to ruin it for everyone. This model has seemingly killed off regional sports networks and replaced them with nothing. It has caused cable networks to punt on broadcasting games several nights a week.
Has anyone checked out FS1’s primetime lineup? Chances are you’re going to find funny car reruns. The number of games on ESPN and most other channels has shrunk drastically over the past few years. Instead, they are behind various paywalls on other platforms, most of which don’t have enough additional content to justify a subscription.
The key difference between streaming and old-school cable TV is flexibility. You don’t have any contracts and it is easy to cancel and sign up. But we have also traded the ability to watch basically anything desired for only being able to watch a specific thing or two in a single place.
That’s not progress. This is the myth of technology, by the way. Something being different and something being good are two entirely different things. Streaming may be different from cable or satellite, but it has yet to improve on what we had. If anything, it has ruined the sports viewing process for many fans.
What’s wild is that it didn’t have to be this way. The groundwork was laid for a remarkable sports streaming experience back in those early days of the technology. This is why I still remember the first time I ever streamed a sporting event despite it being a random, meaningless basketball game. It was good progress.
However, instead of developing into something people would want to pay for, it has warped into something we’re forced to buy at gunpoint under threat of not being able to watch sports at all.
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The grey market IPTV solution
I’m going to admit to something I probably shouldn’t. I subscribe to one of those dodgy IPTV providers. If you aren’t familiar with these, they operate like YouTube TV. The main difference is that this service gives you basically every sporting event and channel in the world.
That’s right. Sky Sports in England. Sportsnet in Canada. Fox Sports in Australia. Every US cable channel and many local ones. I have access to them all. It is everything I have ever wanted from television–the freedom to watch anything I want in one place.
Look, it is not perfect. I would say the system works 80-85 percent of the time. Which is pretty damn good, all things considered. The quality on my tablet is great but casting on my television hovers between 720p and 1080p. It is acceptable.
Then there is, of course, the price. I pay roughly $120 annually for all this goodness. Honestly, the price is a bonus. I would fork over a lot more for this. Especially if I could get a high-quality feed on my television. That would be amazing.
TV rights, advertising and all that noise mean that would never be possible, which seems stupid when you think about it. Now, there are probably some of you sitting on a moral high horse calling me a thief or what have you.
You can think whatever you want but let’s make one thing perfectly clear. The only reason I have to use this dodgy IPTV provider is because no traditional company wants to offer the service I want in one place. This is the same reason I, and countless others, used Limewire back in the day.
It wasn’t about stealing a bunch of music, although some people did that. For a lot of folks, Limewire was used to get what they wanted in a timely fashion. Asking consumers to jump through an extraordinary number of hoops for something routine is ridiculous when it is readily available online for less or nothing.
Better yet, what do you do when that thing isn’t available at all? College football simply isn’t offered in Southeast Asia through any provider. I have lived through this nightmare in Bangkok for years aside from 2019 when ESPN Player was available.
Streaming was built on this idea of democratizing how we consume television in all its forms. The ability to watch everything you want to watch, wherever you may be. Over the years though, it simply morphed into less stable, more cumbersome cable television.
By the way, all these groups figured out how to take the sports-watching experience apart so there is no reason they couldn’t put it all together again. Hell, they may even find that people will pay a premium for the service.
I know I would because, as it stands, streaming has ruined sports. Leagues may be unwittingly shooting themselves in the foot by failing to improve the current situation. The NBA and soccer are going out of their way to change their respective sports in a bid to attract new fans. But how will anyone watch if they can’t find where to watch it?
This isn’t about technology or progress. It’s solely about common sense. Everyone sees what exists when it comes to watching sports and knows it really shouldn’t this awful given all the advancements currently available. Seriously, how is this not a golden age for sports fans?
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