It takes a lot to annoy me. I will even pay for a lot before I get annoyed. But trying to watch sports has become the bane of my existence. I am the kind of person that I can watch any kind of sport. But these leagues think hiding every game behind a paywall and/or a subscription, is the way to go… all the while whining about viewership going down.

A few years ago I cut the cable cord. And I haven’t really looked back…especially since much of what I like to watch is old school and not shown on tv regularly. In the beginning, it was fine. I could find something on Hulu, Netflix and Crunchyroll was cool. I was spending about $20 for all my apps and everything was working fine. It remained fine for a few years since I wasn’t watching sports much. (That is a longer story…)

But now that I am in my sports bag again… I have an anger trying to get streaming services because it is getting ridiculous. There is no way they are making watching sports this hard. (This would make me go back to cable… but I am an out of market fan.) And then the icing on the cake is watching everyone complain that viewership is down. At this point, it is easier to buy tickets to a game and go.

It started during the pandemic and was able to recapture my love for many things like the Food Network, Murder, She Wrote and Scooby Doo. Food Network was hard to get ahold of without cable not to mention oxygen. Lucky for me, Discover had a service with all of the food network on it as well as Planet Earth. And because it was an add on to my Verizon bill… It was no big deal.

For a while, that worked. I was content. I had things I could watch and I was content but then I got drawn into talking about hockey again with my friend, Leah… so I decided to hop back into that… but hockey, baseball are all centralized. So it wasn’t as easy as just tuning to see a game and it really should be. It would be so much easier if I could pay to stream games of my teams in a single place… but I digress. Thank God my teams are all (mostly) based in NYC… and I get MSG networks… with FuboTv that has made all the difference.

Fubo is cool in that I have the sports package and a dvr in case I miss the games… I can watch things recorded and I also have access to live tv. The service focuses primarily on channels that distribute live sports. Depending on the country it is accessed in, channels offered by Fubo include access to the Premier League, NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS, CPL, and international football, as well as news, network television series, and movies.

Of course for me, nothing ever runs that smoothly… So while I could see certain games… anything that appeared on the TNT network, be it NFL or NBA… I didn’t get it. Weird. I found out that TNT removed themselves from the package… and lo and behold they have their own streaming service… insert eyeroll. It was really weird but it also meant that I couldn’t see any games that were on TNT… making playoff time for both the NHL and NBA hard to watch. SN: Playoff hockey and basketball gives me something to do heading into the spring time. Good vibes… giving myself a heart attack but not much.

I get an HBO account because they had Living Single, and A Different World. That was really all I needed. I had gotten rid of Discover… because most of that stuff was moved to HBO anyway.. I am wondering if that is a huge mistake but I am liking that they added sports. I used to have ESPN as part of my Disney Bundle but I get rid of it in favor of the bundle with HBO max… I think that I am on the come up because HBO has the Bleacher Report. It was great until the bait and switch that came up.. I figured that since I could watch basketball I was getting a deal. But of course that lasted a month before they hid all the sports behind the premium feature. SUPER ANNOYING…

This sort of shenanigans makes me rethink the services and watching sports altogether. It blows being an out of market fan and not being able to watch your team on a regular basis just based on location. And then when willing to pay… you are nickeled and dimed out of being able to watch your team’s games. And then after forking over your hard earned money, they tell you, that you still can’t watch certain games. Well.. I am trying to figure out the best route, but I also have a few subscriptions that I need to cancel when these seasons are over. Don’t get me started on how Gotham Sports the app is the worst thing I have ever tried to get to work. I should not have to sign in over and over.