And there’s no better example of that than this one right here. The Seahawks game was ONLY available on ESPN+, which is a separate subscription from all the other ESPN networks. It’s even excluded from the (hella expensive) Sunday Ticket package, as the game was a Monday night event.

In order to steam all NFL games this season, you have to subscribe to all of these:

1. Sunday Ticket
2. ESPN+
3. Amazon Prime
4. Peacock
5. Netflix

Absolutely. I’m a fan of a team which is not in my “local market”. As best I can tell, there isn’t actually a way for me to stream all of the games for that team. Even looking at the Sunday Ticket service, it seemed like it was a mess of “you can stream some games, except for cases A, B, C and when the Moon is in the House of Scorpio on the third Sunday after Venus transits Leo”. And there seemed to be weird device restrictions with similarly arcane timing.

I’d be happy to pay for “Steam all games of Team X for $Y on any device”. Even if the only choice was “Pay $Z to stream all the games on any device”. But, being dicked around to actually follow one team has meant that I only watch games when they randomly line up with streaming services I do have. Otherwise, I catch the highlights the next day on Youtube (the NFL’s official channel posts them).

I can absolutely understand folks using pirate streams. The official service is pretty terrible versus the pirates services, which are pretty functional.