Why It’s So Hard to Find Sports on TV

Fans, including the author's Yankees-obsessed wife, now need multiple subscriptions—and lots of patience—to follow their teams

By James K. Willcox

Updated April 25, 2024

A photo collage with numerous TV network and streaming service logos laid over a TV with a New York Yankees player on it. — With major sports leagues cutting deals with Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and other streaming services, it's getting harder and more expensive to watch every game.

It’s getting very frustrating to follow your favorite teams on TV.

My wife is a prime example. A devoted baseball fan, Lisa has to constantly flip back and forth among different cable channels and streaming services to catch every New York Yankees game, even though we have access to the team’s own YES regional sports network.

A lot of those games are spread across various TV networks and streaming services. It’s expensive to pay for them all, and aggravating to figure out where each game is being shown. And it’s not just the Yankees—you have the same problem if you’re a fan of another baseball team, an NFL franchise, or teams in other sports, from soccer to hockey.

In this article

How Watching Got So Complicated
Where Is That Game Again?

Let’s start with cable and satellite TV. Sports have been called the glue that keeps many people stuck to traditional TV plans, and that’s my situation. I write about cord-cutting all the time, but I haven’t been able to cut the cord myself because of the damn Yankees.

To watch the majority of Yankees games, Lisa needs the YES Network, which is showing 138 of the 162 games this year. We get access to YES through a $160-a-month DirecTV satellite plan. I’ve been wanting to ditch that service for a lower-cost streaming alternative, but it’s not easy. Last year, the only cable-style TV streaming service that included YES was DirecTV Stream, the internet version of a service we already have. But to a package that included YES, other cable channels, and premium services such as Max would have cost us $150 a month, offering very little savings.

We stuck with the DirecTV satellite service.

Our options expanded this year. First, a cable-style streaming service, Fubo, added the YES Network to its roster of regional sports networks. That seemed like good news, but it wasn’t a game changer. The least expensive Pro plan costs $80 a month, which isn’t too bad. But then Fubo tacks on a $15-a-month regional sports fee, making the real price $95. And if we went for Fubo and got rid of satellite, we’d lose access to two streaming services that are part of our package: Max and Paramount+/Showtime. Getting those à la carte would cost $27 a month.

That would bring our monthly total to nearly $125 a month, and we’d still be missing networks, including Starz and Cinemax premium channels, that we get with DirecTV. But we really thought the saving grace would be the launch of a stand-alone YES direct-to-consumer service this spring. Unfortunately, the price is steep: $25 a month or $240 annually. That’s in line with what other new stand-alone, direct-to-consumer sports networks are charging. For example, NESN, which shows Boston Red Sox (please don’t tell Lisa I mentioned that team) and Bruins games, charges $30 a month or $330 a year.

Why so much? In cable plans, sports programming has always been subsidized by subscribers who never actually watch games. Direct-to-consumer services don’t have that option. For now, at least, we’re keeping satellite TV.

But remember, it’s not just about price. The biggest problem for my wife is that not all Yankees games are shown on the YES Network because they’re now spread out across multiple networks and services. All this has made me the target of her frustration because she assumes that I should be able to make it easier for her to watch the games. “You write about TV and streaming services for a living,” she says. “Can’t you figure this out?”

And Lisa hates that the YES stand-alone service doesn’t allow us to record games, which is how we typically watch baseball. We recently found out that games broadcast on YES can be viewed on-demand within 48 hours on the YES app (under the “Trending Now” section), but that means watching them on the network’s schedule, not ours.

How Watching Sports Got So Complicated

Back in the halcyon days of my youth, Yankees games were broadcast on a local over-the-air channel, WPIX-11. In the late 1970s, the landscape changed with the addition of sports-centric channels. By 2000, most markets had some type of regional sports network, or RSN. Teams typically split their games between a local broadcast TV station and the RSN. But as the number of cable subscribers grew, more games shifted to the RSNs.

That’s what happened here in New York with the YES regional sports network, which is owned by the Yankees, Sinclair Broadcasting, Amazon, and investor groups. Until 2022, there was always a broadcast partner—like WPIX-11—that carried a package of Yankees games. But that year, Amazon took over those games exclusively, so for the first time there were no Yankees games on the old TV channel.

I’m okay with that, but it’s harder to accept that my wife and I can’t watch all the games on YES. (That “Y” stands for Yankees, right?) And it’s not like just one or two games are missing. This year, the Yankees will be playing not only on YES but also on ESPN, Fox, FS1, and TBS.

Those channels are all included in our expensive satellite TV service. But it doesn’t stop there.

To see literally every single Yankees game—something apparently stipulated in our marriage vows—we need a paid subscription to Apple TV+, which extended its rights to stream two live MLB games every Friday throughout the 2024 regular season. (In 2022 Apple showed those games free of charge.) So far, three Yankees games are on the schedule for the first half of the season.

One bit of good news: As far as we can tell, NBCUniversal’s Peacock didn’t renew its exclusive deal for “MLB Sunday Leadoff,” a package that featured a total of 19 live games last year. I contacted MLB to confirm but haven’t received a reply as of the update to this article.

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But if you’re a Yankees fan who doesn’t live near New York or can’t get access to YES, you’ll need MLB.TV, and that’s $30 a month or $150 a year.

And oh, yeah, honey, remember that exclusive Amazon deal mentioned above? To watch the 21 nighttime Yankees games Amazon will show this season, we need an Amazon Prime membership. That’s $139 a year.

To be clear, other sports are just as hard to follow on TV.

In 2022, NFL football fans saw “Thursday Night Football” jump to Amazon Prime from Fox as part of an exclusive deal that runs through 2033. If you want to see “Monday Night Football” this fall, you’ll need ESPN or the Spanish-language ESPN Deportes. (Some games are also on ABC, and ESPN+ has an exclusive international game.) NBCUniversal’s Peacock signed a deal that gives it one exclusive in-season and one exclusive wild-card playoff game for the 2024 season. That’s in addition to the other NFL football games on CBS (and Paramount+), Fox, and NBC (and Peacock).

Where Is That Game Again?

As my wife knows all too well, figuring out when and where games can be watched has become a full-time chore, given the 162-game baseball season. (The DirecTV program guide lists only the games shown on its service.) For example, in 2022 most of Amazon’s games were shown on Fridays; last year they jumped to Wednesdays.

And it’s not just the added complexity and cost, my wife says. She has grown accustomed to the YES announcers, plus the way game stats—pitch count, ball and bat speeds, the runners on base, and the number of outs—are displayed on YES. Switching networks often removes those connections.

Unfortunately, this is a trend. While YES is the most profitable, most-watched regional sports network in the country, many others are in trouble. Their business model is changing, as cord-cutting hits record levels. That means fewer subscribers are paying for plans that include regional sports, and many cable-style streaming services are dropping those networks.

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Many RSNs are stuck in sports rights deals that no longer make financial sense, too. Last year, Diamond Sports—which this year has the broadcast rights to 12 MLB teams under the Bally Sports umbrella—declared bankruptcy. Diamond also has the rights to 15 NBA and 11 NHL teams. It’s currently trying to reorganize, with a restructuring plan backed by Amazon that’s slated to get a hearing this June. Last year it settled with two teams—the San Diego Padres and the Arizona Diamondbacks—whose games it stopped broadcasting, and the Phoenix Suns basketball team cut a deal that splits games between local over-the-air stations and a streaming service. And last year Warner Bros. Discovery shut down its AT&T SportsNet regional sports network, with three of the four teams taking ownership of the local broadcast rights.

All this means that it’s likely that we’ll see more sports events shift away from RSNs to better-funded streaming services.

As for me, I recently texted my wife with a link to the New York Yankees broadcast schedule—including where the games will be available to watch—and suggested that she keep it on her phone.

Her suggestion to me? I can’t repeat it here.

James K. Willcox

James K. Willcox leads Consumer Reports’ coverage of TVs, streaming media services and devices, broadband internet service, and the digital divide. He's also a homeowner covering several home improvement categories, including power washers and decking. A veteran journalist, Willcox has written for Business Week, Cargo, Maxim, Men’s Journal, Popular Science, Rolling Stone, Sound & Vision, and others. At home, he’s often bent over his workbench building guitars or cranking out music on his 7.2-channel home theater sound system.