Sure, I mean legit free online. All the terrestrial channels are free online here. You’d think it would be part of the FCC licence these days. You want public airwaves? You make your content available to everyone.
OTA is free here also if you get reception, and various networks have their own setups for streaming online; many of them just have on-demand shows with lots of interstitial commercials but some do live streaming. The problem is it’s all a pain in the ass, and you may need to go to a website to view the stream when you want to sit on your couch, and everything is in a different spot, so it’s an overall unpleasant experience.
That’s supposed to be the advantage of YouTubeTV or just paying for cable, it isn’t a huge pain in the rear end.
All the content owners learned a hard lesson in 1999 with Napster and Limewire and the rest of the infant P2P services-- if you don’t give people a high quality, reasonably priced, non-annoying way to pay for your content, they’ll pirate instead. That’s why Hulu existed.
They have since forgotten that lesson-- but piracy has come a long way in the past 20 years. It’s ridiculously mature now, pretty easy to setup, and offers a tremendously superior experience.
By the way, AMC+ is $2/mo for a year right now (as an annual sub of $24, which of course will go up to $100+ the following year). I was enticed by it supposedly also including Shudder. It does not. It contains a small amount of Shudder content, but I’d estimate under a quarter. Similarly, it has Sundance Now and something else and I’m betting those are just content samplers as well. But, $24 for a year’s worth of binging AMC’s prestige shows is still a deal worth calling out. Even if their website/app is kind of shitty.
Fuckin patent trolls…
I don’t know why they make it so hard to watch sports if you don’t have cable. My wife is a HUGE Seattle Kraken fan so I wanted to find a way to legally watch the games online. Oh, they are on ESPN+, awesome! Guess what, even though I have ESPN+ I can’t watch it because those games are blacked out. In fact, the only way I can watch them online is by paying $60-80 to get a streaming service that has root sports. Of course, I could also go through the hassle of paying for a VPN so I could trick ESPN+ into thinking I’m not where I am. Or, even easier, I could just go to a website and watch a free stream of the game, guess which one I’m picking.
I mean, they like money. No doubt that website is illegal.
Sports fans are probably willing to spend much more than average to watch their favorite team, or at least it seems like most providers assume they are.
Local blackouts for the RSNs are the dumbest fucking shit in sports, and given that sports includes virulent idiots like Kyrie Irving, that’s really saying something. I hope all their headquarters collapse into sinkholes 5 minutes before the staff leave for Xmas break.
I’m with Armando on this one. I pay for cable, which means – whether I want it or not – I’m paying a not insignificant amount of money for regional sports networks. Honestly, I don’t care about regional sports per se, and would rather just subscribe to whatever streaming service carries the sports I want to watch rather than paying 2x as much to Comcast to only be able to watch some of what I want.
Disney and Google have reached a deal. Presumably Disney was playing hardball and Google folded after getting angry complaints and cancellations.