Big Muddy
Registered User
- Dec 15, 2019
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In the U.S., to watch your favourite non local hockey team (like the Ottawa Senators), you can catch most games on a streaming service like ESPN+. But, there’s still some games (like Senators versus any of the NYS teams) where they are only available on cable channels. Then, if you want watch another sport like NFL football, you can watch some games on national broadcast cable channels, Amazon Prime for Thursday night games, and Youtube (who now have the broadcast rights equivalent to Sunday Ticket) if you wanted to pick the game you prefer watching.I don't think there is much reason to stick with one specific cable provider. You might be able to pull the "I'm going to cancel!" routine and get the best possible deal via Rogers or Bell, then just rinse and repeat when your promotional period is up. If you already have other over the top services like Netflix, and you can get a few of the channels you want with an over-the-air antenna, the only reason to stick with cable is hockey or sports. Because of how regional deals are structured with sports leagues, unless you're out of the territory of the team, there is no cheaper (legal) way to follow a specific sports team or watch specific sports that you want. With that said, if you just want to watch a few hours of sports a week and don't care about the specific team, there are games on both over the air, and some streaming services.
Cable is going to die as soon as the regional sports bubble collapses and/or streaming services get all the sports, along with their older user base all dying. Sports are the only non-negotiable reason for most people to get cable.
Its getting pretty fractured. With the multi-trillion dollar giant tech companies getting into the content game, it's just different companies making the money and replacing other companies who have provided the content & service in the past. I’m not sure the consumer is that much further ahead although I suppose some would argue that. With the bad code that Crowd Strike distributed, a major supplier of security software to Microsoft that took down 8 million Microsoft machines, you have to wonder (for other reasons besides this one outage as well) if the anti-trust rulings aren’t that far off.