Sports streaming is a fragmented hot mess

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

This week, JJ Watt finally had enough. The former NFL star, who played for the Houston Texans for close to a decade, took to X to declare that he was ready to give up on watching Monday Night Football. “Just frustrating,” Watt posted. “All of it.”

Watt’s ire was caused by the ongoing carriage dispute between Disney and YouTube TV, which resulted in ESPN, and a bunch of other Disney networks, going dark on the Google-owned pay TV service on October 30th. The two companies are fighting over the money YouTube has to pay to carry Disney’s networks, with both rejecting the other side’s demands as unreasonable.

The spat resulted in YouTube TV’s roughly 10 million subscribers not being able to turn into Monday Night Football this week. Some hardcore fans responded by signing up for trials of competing services like Hulu Live or Fubo, but Watt wasn’t having it. “I’m not paying for another streaming subscription,” he pouted.

Watt’s Monday night meltdown is emblematic of the weird world of sports TV in 2025: There are more options than ever to watch matches online, including a growing number of free streams, and streams included with your existing video subscriptions. At the same time, sports streaming is increasingly fragmented. As a result, it’s easier than ever to tune into sports if you’re a casual viewer — but incredibly complex if you’re a hardcore fan dead set on watching every single game of your favorite team and then some.

Sports was long seen as the lone pay TV holdout. The thing that would keep people hooked to their cable subscription, or perhaps help the industry transition from cable- and satellite-based TV services to online pay TV bundles. Think YouTube TV, Sling, Fubo, and the like.

Then, the big streamers opened their wallets, and the leagues just couldn’t say no. Amazon spent big on Thursday Night Football. Netflix got in bed with WWE. Apple teamed up with MLS. On top of those major deals, streamers also freely spent on high-profile one-offs. YouTube streamed its first NFL game in front of the paywall in September. Netflix will once again stream two NFL games over Christmas, while NBC’s Peacock will stream one game on December 27th.

But it’s not just one-offs popping up on streaming. In the 2024–25 season, close to half of all NFL games were only available on pay TV services, according to an analysis published by Activate Consulting as part of the company’s annual Media & Technology Outlook this week. This time around, every single game of the season will be on a streaming service as well.

The amount of sports available for free is also growing, and it’s increasingly starting to feel like basic cable. There are now 227 free, ad-supported linear sports streaming channels (also known as FAST channels in entertainment industry parlance) available to viewers worldwide, according to a report published by Gracenote this week.

Granted, some of those channels only air older matches or sports documentaries. But live sports is moving to FAST as well: “In August 2025, 36 percent of the programming on sports channels was live sports,” says Gracenote SVP of product Tyler Bell. By October, that number had inched up to 38.1 percent.

Among the most recent companies to embrace free sports streaming: the FanDuel Sports Network, which announced last week that it will bring select NBA and NHL games to FAST channels this fall, with plans to launch its own dedicated 24/7 FAST channel next year. The network’s embrace of free live sports is primarily promotional: Previously known as Bally Sports, the regional sports network wants to use games in front of the paywall to grow the number of subscribers of its own paid streaming service.

Live sports games that are free, or feel free because you’ve already paid for Netflix or Amazon Prime, as a loss leader to attract and retain consumers: That’s a growing strategy for streamers, but it doesn’t exactly make things easier for fans. Some executives are quite open about the fact that they have no intention of paying billions of dollars for expansive rights packages when they can get the same kind of attention with a few tentpole events.

“We’re focused on big live events,” declared Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos on the company’s most recent earnings call. “We’re not currently focused on the big season packages.”

With sports popping up everywhere — from Netflix to Apple TV to FAST channels — more people are starting to get hooked. The number of sports fans in the US grew from 168 million in 2022 to 195 million in 2025, according to Activate Consulting. This increase can be directly attributed to the growing availability of sports on streaming services, says Activate founder and CEO Michael Wolf. “Broader access to and availability of sports programming are among the primary drivers behind the growth of sports fandom in the United States.”

The flip side of this growing availability across a wide range of different services: Puzzling it all together gets more and more challenging for fans. 46 percent of consumers believe it’s getting harder to find what they want to watch, according to Gracenote’s report. And while the Nielsen subsidiary didn’t specifically ask this question about sports content, finding the games you want can be especially challenging.

“Sports suffers from extreme fragmentation due to the complex integration of user entitlements, broadcast rights, and local market availability,” Bell says. It’s worth noting that Bell’s employer Gracenote does have a dog in this fight: The company sells program guide data to streaming platforms and device makers, and pitches this kind of data as a solution to consumer confusion, noting that 68 percent of consumers would prefer a single, unified guide to find all their programming.

However, even the best guide may not be able to help with some of the confusion caused by a business in transition. Case in point: JJ Watt was among the many people this week to find out that the monthly fee they pay for ESPN Plus, often as part of a bundle that also includes Hulu and Disney, doesn’t actually give them access to all of ESPN’s Monday Night Football games. For that, they’d have to subscribe to Disney’s new ESPN Unlimited service instead.

“The crazy part is, I have some sort of subscription because I watch Espanyol matches on ESPN+ But I can’t watch MNF,” Watt posted on X, adding: “I don’t understand it and quite frankly just don’t really care to figure it out.”