Just a decade ago, if you were a Yankees fan in New York, you just needed a cable subscription to watch every regular-season game and the playoffs.
Now, in 2026, it could require navigating 10 networks, five (or more) subscriptions and approaching a thousand dollars to see all the team’s games if it goes deep into October.
It is a prime example of the angst of the modern sports fan.
Where are my team’s games on? Do I have that service? And how much does it cost?
The Yankees open the 2026 MLB regular season tonight with their game exclusively available on Netflix. The confusion and expense are byproducts of leagues’ desires to increase or maintain their television revenues in a scattered media environment increasingly focused on streaming.
The NFL produced 83 of the top 100 Nielsen shows in 2025. It aired games on Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN, ABC, Amazon Prime Video, NFL Network, YouTube and Netflix. The NFL currently rakes in around $11 billion per year for its games, but it plans to ask its partners (and potentially new ones) for billions more.
The networks could very well pass on the added costs to consumers, along with the “how to watch” questions. The NFL is not alone in seeking the most money, as all leagues are trying to maximize their rights fees, but their disparate solutions have created an ecosystem that increasingly incenses fans.
When asked about the current sports TV landscape, nearly 90 percent of fans responded that they were at least “somewhat” frustrated, according to the latest report from Hub Entertainment, a firm that analyzes consumer views.
None other than Apple’s lead TV executive, senior vice president of services Eddy Cue, weighed in.
“We’ve gone backwards,” Cue said at Motorsport Network’s Autosport Business Exchange. “You used to buy one subscription, your cable subscription, and you got pretty much everything they had. Now, there’s so many different subscriptions, so I think that needs to be fixed.”
Recently, FCC chairman Brendan Carr chimed in on social media.
“Watching your favorite team play isn’t as easy these (days,)” he tweeted as part of a statement asking for public comment.
This week’s start to the new baseball season provides a stark illustration. Let’s go back to the typical Yankees fan in New York, who just wants to watch all the team’s regular-season games:
In all, a Yankees fan will need access to eight networks for the full 162-game slate, plus potentially two more if the Yankees make the playoffs.
“We would love to have all the games on YES and Amazon,” Yankees president and YES chairman Randy Levine said, citing the home of the team’s regional partners, which will have access to around 87 percent of the club’s regular-season games. “We are part of MLB and they are allowed to place games on their national platforms. I feel bad for fans who have trouble finding the games and have to pay for additional subscriptions to watch the games.”
Here are the associated costs — nearly $800 for the season — using the minimum subscription costs for accessing games. For example, only one month of Netflix (not nine months, like cable) is required to watch the season opener. Let’s also assume the typical Yankees fan might want to tune in for other big, nationally televised baseball games or the full playoffs (and Yankees fans outside of the greater New York region will need additional subscription-only access points — like MLB.tv — that are not reflected below).
For all that money spent on live sports, viewers get a heap of frustration: Not knowing where to find their games daily; not enjoying their non-local broadcasters; and having to manage all those recurring bills, often with price increases seemingly out of nowhere. Older fans often struggle with the technology. Nearly everyone bears the added costs.
As Levine said, the networks, leagues and new platforms understand the problem. The issue is that everyone wants to dominate the post-cable, direct-to-consumer landscape. It is a mess of frustration that needs to be untangled.
Clubhouse reporter Meredith Marakovits will be a familiar face for Yankees fans subscribing to YES Network. (Jerome Miron / Imagn Images)
Several major platforms are trying to be the next home of sports viewing, as cable and satellite reimagine themselves to compete with the emerging dominant players from Amazon to YouTube.
“I’m very optimistic that over the next several years, we should be able to deliver a much more uniform experience,” said Christian Oestlien, YouTube’s vice president of subscription products.
YouTube TV, the company’s cable-like digital service, just introduced a sports-only package. For $65 per month, it offers most national programming, including all of ESPN, Fox, NBC, CBS and TNT. But it still lacks Prime Video, Apple, Netflix or the majority of regional sports networks.
Prime Video, with its subscriptions feature, is trying to package as many paid networks as possible together for a one-stop viewing experience.
“That is what Prime Video is endeavoring to solve,” said Amazon’s head of sports partnerships, Charlie Neiman, whose company launched its strategy a decade ago.
From Roku to traditional cable services, like Spectrum and Comcast, everyone is trying to navigate the angst felt from every corner of sports fandom, while still trying to maximize their own profit margins.
Despite the availability of almost every network as an “a la carte” subscription offering, it still makes sense for a typical fan to have basic cable or a streaming comparable (YouTube TV, Hulu + Live, Fubo, etc.) that offers access to the basic broadcast and cable networks that show so many live sports. For this illustration, we picked YouTube TV and its new “sports”-only package, along with prominent streaming services that offer near-year-round live sports offerings.
How did we get here? Was the cable bundle a better system? And are we on the verge of The Great Rebundling, where fans will once again be able to go to one place and find all their sports?
Beginning in the 1970s, the cable bundle would evolve into probably the most profitable business model in sports media history: Recurring revenue, seemingly in perpetuity, with a virtual monopoly and the ability to increase prices without much recourse from consumers.
Through the decades, cable became centered around ESPN, its 24-7 portfolio of games and shows, and its leverage over cable providers, who passed on those increased costs to fans. The network peaked in more than 100 million homes by 2011, resulting in billions of dollars in payments from cable distributors — whether consumers were watching ESPN or not. Plus, ESPN made billions more in advertising revenue. Combined with ESPN, the cable bundle offered access to broadcast networks and sports-centric cable outlets, like TNT Sports and Fox Sports. Plus, there was access to regional sports networks for local MLB, NBA and NHL games.
While the cable companies were notoriously a pain to deal with as an individual consumer, for around $60 per month for “expanded basic cable,” you could watch all your favorite teams’ national and local games and flip your channels with ease.
The digital earthquake through traditional media has actually taken its time wreaking havoc on live sports, compared to what it has done to other traditional media like music, radio and newspapers.
Netflix became ubiquitous as a subscription product, while YouTube became the go-to platform for younger (and then increasingly older) viewing habits. That left live sports, led by ESPN and Fox, and news as the main drivers keeping people on basic cable.
To compete with Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube and the threat to the cable bundles, the traditional players started their own streaming services, as older subscribers cut the cord and younger ones never even thought about signing up for cable TV.
In 2020, NBC (with Peacock) and CBS (with Paramount+) both put their NFL games on their streaming services, while maintaining them on broadcast TV. In addition, Peacock and a side service for ESPN, ESPN+, placed exclusive NFL games just on those platforms. The games were presented as “over the top,” meaning bypassing broadcast and cable.
“The acceleration of sports over the top has led to a lot more sports fans’ strife than we were expecting,” said Robert Fishman, a senior analyst at MoffettNathanson, a leading independent equity research publisher.
Plainly, it made it so there was no clean, uniform fan experience. By 2025, ESPN had dropped to 58.7 million homes, according to Nielsen. It still owns the best sports rights portfolio, but has plenty of competition.
Of the streamers, Prime Video has had the most aggressive rights-acquisition plan since it launched in 2018 and has now acquired major rights to the NFL, the NBA, some local Yankees games and a vast array of international events. It has been joined by Apple TV, which has deals with MLB, MLS and F1. Netflix has added Christmas Day NFL games, three MLB events (Opening Day, Home Run Derby and the “Field of Dreams” game) this season and the 2031 Women’s World Cup. YouTube has NFL Sunday Ticket, which allows fans to view all out-of-market Sunday games, and streamed its first regular-season NFL game in September.
Ian Eagle and Stan Van Gundy are part of Amazon Prime’s NBA coverage. (Photo by Al Bello / Getty Images)
The beauty of today is that you can almost see any game, anywhere, at any time in the world. And you can have it all at a price. This all-you-can-eat buffet is available in nearly every sport, where a fan can have a completely full plate or just pick at the menu.
If you want to watch every Sunday NFL game, it can cost anywhere from $400 to $500 per season with YouTube’s Sunday Ticket. If you are not a diehard fan or don’t want to spend that kind of serious dough, 87 percent of NFL games are on broadcast TV (Fox, CBS, NBC & ABC), meaning, with a simple cheap antenna on your TV, a fan would not have to pay one dollar. A local fan, say a Cheesehead in Milwaukee, can watch every NFL game without charge, as ESPN and Prime Video games are required by the NFL to be on local broadcast TV.
Still, there is constant frustration for fans. Not everyone pays for Prime Video and Netflix, while others have cut the cord and don’t have cable.
MLB’s league-wide deals and the popularity of the Yankees explain why the team is on so often on different platforms. While the Yankees, with YES, and the Dodgers, with Spectrum SportsNet LA, have lucrative regional cable deals, smaller market networks are in disarray. MLB hopes to have a full local streaming service with all its teams by the end of the decade that would put an end to blackouts.
The NBA had a similar regional issue, but in its new 11-year, $76 billion TV deals, it took games from local networks and gave them to three national platforms, remaining with ABC/ESPN while adding NBC/Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. To see all the New York Knicks’ games, fans need four subscriptions.
One ongoing frustration remains switching in and out of apps. Prime Video and YouTube have been leaders in modernizing the clicker. It is very easy to have four games on at once on their services and to expand one near-instantly to take up the full screen. Their limitations are that you don’t have all the games in one place.
This technical maze is among the challenges that platforms like YouTube, Amazon Prime Channels, Roku and Spectrum are trying to solve.
YouTubeTV – which is the sister, cable-like partner to the free YouTube – has the most momentum in the industry. Despite launching in 2017, it has more than 10 million subscribers. That puts it on a trajectory to soon potentially surpass Spectrum and Comcast, which are in the 12 million subscriber range, as the most dominant cable-like bundle. When it combines with the creator-based, mostly free service of YouTube, it has a vastly bigger audience than any other platform.
The company says viewers consumed 40 billion hours of sports on its service in 2025. While it may never include the inventory of Netflix, Apple TV or Prime Video, YouTube is attempting to become the one-stop shop for the average fan with its $65 per month sports-only bundle.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean we will be the party that is licensing all of the rights,” said Oestlien, the VP of subscription products. “Our league partners are very cognizant of how fragmented the market has become. How hard it is to actually figure out where a game is going to be on any particular day.”
“Apple TV+” rebranded to “Apple TV,” but its “Friday Night Baseball” continues in 2026. (Luke Hales / Getty Images)
Oestlien and his team spend a lot of time trying to make it easier to find the content. Later this year, YouTube TV will integrate ESPN Unlimited into its basic subscription offering, giving fans that many more games to watch in a single interface.
Since beginning a little more than a decade ago, Amazon Prime Video has the most robust channel store, where you can live in its app and have access to navigate an array (if not all) of the streaming apps.
“We identified that fragmentation and discovery and payment management and these types of things were potential issues and headwinds for customers,” Neiman said. “They wanted one place where they could go to consume most of their content. That was the thesis back then. If we fast-forward to now, everything has borne out tenfold.”
Amazon has created a bundle-like system that a customer can build on their own within Prime Video. While it has services like Fox, Peacock, Paramount Plus and NBA League Pass, it doesn’t have ESPN Unlimited or Netflix.
Prime Video has probably solved the “re-bundle” problem better so far than anyone digitally, but still not fully. Disney, for one, does not want Amazon to own the relationship with its customers. (Amazon does not release numbers for how many subscriptions it has sold in its service.)
Meanwhile, cable companies like Spectrum have found a way to entice consumers by adding to their traditional bundle with ESPN Unlimited, Fox One, HBO Max, Paramount+ and more, creating a slight uptick in Spectrum’s subscriber numbers and bucking what had been a steep trend downward.
It was never perfect, but it has gotten more confusing and expensive for fans. Maybe one day we can go back to the future, with one fee for all the games. They could call the system… basic cable.