How to Watch Live Sports on TV without cable
Seeking current advice about how to watch professional sports live on TV--basketball, football, tennis in particular--that's cheaper than the "limited basic' cable plan we have with Comcast. We also have subscriptions to Amazon Video and Disney Plus for kids' shows. These three subscriptions combined make up a huge portion of our household bills and I'd love to reduce our costs. I could see us purchasing an indoor digital antenna for local channels which would give us a few events but that wouldn't meet our needs entirely, and it's possibly too windy where we live to use an outdoor antenna. Is a satellite dish still a 'thing'? Has anyone tried Sling, which now offers local networks in addition to streaming ESPN and other channels? Any other creative options out there for an avid sports fan?
Would love some basic education about what the current choices and tradeoffs are--either direct advice from BPN community or online sources. I feel like I'm in the dark ages and am daunted by the transition to something that may not meet our needs. Many thanks!
Parent Replies
I looked into this before the start of the NBA season. I had stripped my services down to a Comcast FlexStream box and a couple of streaming services that I could activate/pause as I used them. But, I missed watching live sports and various awards shows in real time.
Long story short, I found that the easiest and most cost effective option (which was still very expensive in my opinion) was to sign up for cable tv service through Comcast again. Anything I could patch together with streaming services ended up costing more or the same and was more of a hassle. I continue to toggle my streaming services on/off. I'll cancel cable service and go back to FlexStream (online or phone order, no equipment change) at the end of basketball season. This approach takes attention and vigilance, but gives me my lowest yearly entertainment cost.
We've never had cable - there's a Disney+Hulu+ESPN bundle you can get - seems like that would be your best bet for live sports! We get all the over the air channels like ABC and FOX for sports for free, and Sling is ok but we dropped it when we had too many streaming service and no time to watch all of them!
We ditched cable and got YouTube tv because my son wanted full access to live sports. It has ads, which I hate, but so does cable. I think it’s about $60/month, which may not be a savings for you.
My husband watches sports (basket ball, football, F1 racing) on YouTube tv. It’s a paid service and has a high monthly fee. But they allow sharing up to 6 accounts, so splitting it with friend could make it more affordable.
This took us forever to figure out and a lot of trial and error. Our system now is we use Hulu as our primary subscription service (so we get almost all live sports) and then we also subscribe to specific apps like apple tv and netflix for other shows we like. Our bill is less than half of what it was (including using sonic now for internet). Good luck.
I believe this is possible with a YouTube TV subscription. My parents got rid of their cable subscription a couple of years ago and switched to YouTube TV and my dad uses it to watch sports. I'm not sure whether this will be less or more expensive for you, however.
We recently moved and ditched Xfinity (Comcast) for YouTube TV. My husband watches sports and the kids watch Nick Jr, Disney Channel, PBS Kids, Etc. It works for us. It was $64.99 when we first signed up. In April it's gone up to $72.99. It's high but still cheaper than what we were paying for Xfinity. You can also add family members to your acct.