The sports fan’s guide to streaming services

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Even in long-term relationships, there sometimes comes a point where both parties need to go their own way. In the case of my 21 years of being a DirecTV subscriber, that moment came when I returned home from a road trip and found some damage to our satellite dish and cable after a storm. Previously, service calls for DirecTV equipment outside the house were free. That is no longer the case. While DirecTV offered a free month of its extended service plan ($8.99 a month afterward) so this one repair would be at no cost to me, I decided we had irreconcilable differences and got a divorce.

The only reason I held on to DirecTV for so long was live sports. Back in the day, DirecTV was unbeatable for live sports. Not only did it have NFL Sunday Ticket, which showed every NFL game live, but it also had basketball, rugby, and even cycling. Over the years, content outside of the major US sports became harder to find on DirecTV as a lot of it moved to streaming services.

Let's note one important thing—even with all the streaming options, watching sports over the air, cable, or satellite is almost always a superior experience to watching streams. Glitches are unfortunately not uncommon when streaming sports. Even Amazon had some stumbles during its first Thursday Night Football broadcasts. The game action also lags more while streaming than with cable or OTA. This can suck if you like to divide your attention between the game and Twitter X or Discord. It will suck even more if you're a gambler who likes to place prop bets during games. With streams lagging 30–50 seconds behind broadcasts, some of those bets will be literally impossible to make if you're streaming.