Sports Fans Stare Down $2,000 Streaming Bill to Follow Favorites

When Ryan Kellermeyer’s second child was on the way, his main question was, “What are we going to do about football this year?”

Devoted Philadelphia Eagles fans living in Indiana, Kellermeyer and his wife subscribe to the National Football League’s Sunday Ticket package that lets them watch many, but not all, of their team’s games. If a particular contest wasn’t available, the couple used to bring their toddler to a local eatery showing it. That strategy, however, wouldn’t be as practical with a baby. “You can’t take a little newborn to a wing restaurant for four hours,” Kellermeyer said.

And they didn’t want to pay for all the additional streaming services needed to watch the missing games at home. With NFL rights increasingly spread across Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video, Comcast Corp.’s Peacock and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube, the cumulative price would reach hundreds of dollars a year. Cobbling together free trials and borrowed logins left him annoyed, often spending a game’s first quarter struggling to get a picture.

“You’re so frustrated by the time you actually get logged in, it makes the experience less enjoyable,” said Kellermeyer, 48, general manager of a family lawn and tree business. “You’re trying to beat the system.”

With pre-season football now underway, many Americans share his irritation.

The rise of streaming services has ended the era when US sports fans could easily follow their favorite teams on a handful of broadcast and cable channels, no special subscriptions required. Instead, pro leagues have signed deals with multiple services, creating a bewildering schedule and a steep cost for watching games at home. That’s particularly true for football fans who live outside their team’s home market, which will still typically have a free broadcast available for most games.

Fan anger has grown loud enough that federal officials have noticed.

The US Department of Justice has launched an investigation into whether the NFL and other leagues are breaking antitrust law in their negotiations with streamers. In a congressional hearing in June, politicians of both parties questioned whether the deals violate a 1961 law that lets the major sports leagues — baseball, basketball, football and hockey — negotiate media agreements on behalf of each league’s teams, since the legislation was written to cover free broadcasts.

“American sports fans are paying more, getting less and navigating a fragmented streaming environment,” said New York Representative Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat in the House for legal issues.

The Federal Communications Commission asked for fan input and received thousands of critical comments. President Donald Trump has even opined that the NFL could stand to make less money.

But it’s not clear whether Washington’s attention will translate into action. Representatives at the June hearing, for example, discussed whether Sunday Ticket could sell skinnier, less-expensive packages tied to a single team. But they haven’t put forward a bill to compel those changes. The Senate is even considering legislation that would extend the 1961 law to cover college sports — potentially imposing more complexity and costs on viewers.

If Congress and the Trump administration don’t act, frustrated fans may turn to litigation, said Kellie Lerner, managing partner of antitrust firm Shinder Cantor Lerner. The NFL already faces a potential $14 billion antitrust verdict — tossed out by a federal judge but now on appeal — from Sunday Ticket subscribers who claim the league and DirecTV conspired to overcharge them.

The Sunday Ticket litigation, dating back to 2015, “was kind of an early indicator of the system going sideways” as fans realized it was getting more expensive to watch their teams, said Lerner, who is not involved in the suit. “Now, we’re really at the point of the straw breaking the proverbial camel’s back.”

The woes of NFL fans are probably the most pronounced because the organization is the most popular US sports league. But the problems multiply if a fan follows several sports.

Russell Cieslica, an upstate New York native who now teaches school in Florida, pays $129.99 a year for MLB.tv to watch his beloved Boston Red Sox. He also subscribes to ESPN+ during hockey season to catch some of the Buffalo Sabres. And he shells out for another five streaming services to ensure he gets every Buffalo Bills football game. All told, Cieslica spends more than $2,000 a year on streaming.

“There are so many platforms carrying games and so many channels,” he said. “It’s not easy.”

The move into streaming has been lucrative for the leagues.

This year alone, the National Basketball Association’s agreements with ABC, NBCUniversal, ESPN and Amazon will garner an estimated $7 billion, after the league dumped its long-time cable partner, Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.’s TNT. The Women’s National Basketball Association reached a landmark, 11-year deal to air games on EW Scripps Co.’s ION, ABC, NBCUniversal and Amazon, and earlier this year added CBS to the mix. Both also show more games on broadcast now than ever before.

Major League Baseball, meanwhile, just began a three-year deal with ESPN, NBCUniversal and Netflix, adding to its existing agreements with Fox, TBS and Apple TV, to rake in about $800 million annually. The National Hockey League is renegotiating its $625-million-a-year broadcasting rights, which are currently split between Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery.

The top dog, by far, is the NFL, which is expected to bring in $12.5 billion a year from its deals with the four broadcasters, plus Amazon, YouTube and Netflix. The league has even explored charging its partners more, given the immense popularity of its games.

But Bloomberg reported Thursday that Paramount Skydance Corp., which owns CBS, has paused negotiations with the NFL while the company deals with legal challenges to its planned $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. And Fox Corp. Chief Executive Officer Lachlan Murdoch said his company won’t change its contract to air NFL games until after the 2029 season.

The NFL says that 87% of its games are “primarily” shown on free, over-the-air broadcast TV. But that means the games are available for free somewhere in the US, not everywhere. And each league has its own blackout rules – restrictions on which games can appear in which locations.

“We’re very committed to broadcast. We always have been, and continue to be,” Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s head of media distribution, said in a statement. “It’s a tremendous way to reach fans, and our focus is on reach.”

The league says its recent deals have mostly moved games from cable to streaming, which has provided access to more fans. The percentage of games shown on broadcast TV has remained largely the same over the past decade, according to the NFL.

“If you only want to use broadcast, you’re still going to have plenty of holes in the lineup,” said David Goodfriend, president of the Sports Fans Coalition advocacy group. “That’s exactly why people feel they’re forced to subscribe to multiple streaming services that they don’t want to get.”

That the leagues can negotiate at all is the result of a legal loophole created by Congress just for them.

Each league is made up of competing businesses that, under normal circumstances, would be barred from setting prices together. But the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act established an antitrust exemption that let the major sports leagues negotiate media deals on behalf of their members, rather than having each team strike its own contracts. It came with a condition: They could only pool broadcast rights for “sponsored telecasting” — programs supported by advertisers and shown for free.

“Congress believed that joint television agreements would help make games more widely available to the public,” Representative Scott Fitzgerald, the Wisconsin Republican in charge of antitrust issues in the House, said at the June hearing. “Sixty-five years later, it’s fair for this body to ask whether the professional sports leagues have kept up their end of the bargain. In my opinion, they have not, and sports fans are paying the price.”

Professional sports are deeply important to the broadcast networks — and their continued survival. Of the top 100 broadcasts in 2025, 96 of them were sports events, including MLB’s World Series. This year’s Super Bowl in February, which featured a half-time show from Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, drew 125 million viewers.

“The entire broadcast model relies on the NFL,” said LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield, speaking on The Varsity podcast. CBS, NBC and ABC “don’t exist the way they do if they don’t have NFL rights.”

Despite the Sports Broadcasting Act’s free-TV requirement, the NFL entered a deal with ESPN in 1987 to air some games on the cable channel. A few years later, the league partnered with satellite company DirecTV to create its Sunday Ticket program, which in 2023 moved to YouTube. Priced between $240 and $480 a season, it offers access to all games not being shown on broadcast or other streaming platforms.

House Republicans are now considering how to revamp the 1961 law, according to an aide to the panel that held the June hearing. No one has proposed eliminating the leagues’ ability to negotiate deals, but lawmakers have suggested placing additional restrictions on them or requiring the law to be reupped every few years.

Kellermeyer, the Eagles fan in Indiana, decided to take matters into his own hands. While he was on paternity leave this year, he created a service called HuddleMaxx that helps fans track calendars of their teams’ broadcast schedules and manage subscriptions to watch them. Tracking a single team is free, but a paid version lets fans follow more than one.

The service only has a handful of users so far and hasn’t turned a profit. Ideally, Kellermeyer said, it shouldn’t have to exist at all.

“A simple, true team pass would be excellent,” he said. “Let us watch the game on TV in real time for one fee, one login. Make it simple to follow a team. We want to follow the teams, and it’s just so complicated.”

— With assistance from Peter Champelli