It’s not surprising that a staggering amount of you are jumping ship by cutting the proverbial TV umbilical cord that is your cable subscription. We pay for hundreds of channels we don’t watch all for the sake of the five to ten networks we do, and at a bloated price most of us cannot afford. While more and more major television networks are beginning to realize that posting full episodes online is convenient, beneficial and lucrative for you and them, live sports programming is still lagging behind.
Most sports fans don’t want to quit paying for cable cold turkey. The HD quality, the big screen TV and the convenience of a remote control are tough to let go of, but you might be able to keep those comforts and get your live sports programming all at the same time. With the extra cash you’ll have from canceling that cable subscription and a bit of ingenuity you can stay on top of all your favorite sports teams in beautiful HD with all the bells and whistles.
NFL Sunday Ticket To-Go is a subscription-based broadband service that costs $350, a one-time cost that must be paid in full before you can stream every Sunday game from your computer or mobile phone. You get everything you would had you subscribed via DirecTV. You get The Red Zone Channel, Instant Stats, highlights and more. You do not need to be a DirecTV subscriber in any way shape or form. This is great for those who live in apartment buildings or are away at school experiencing dorm life.
NHL GameCenter Live is a subscription-based service that allows you to watch up to 40 out of market games a week. Some of the features include: DVR Functionality, 4 Game Mosaic, PiP, and ability to watch archived games. For a $169 or monthly payments of $20 each, this is pretty much a steal. This may be the best user interface for watching live sports online I have ever come across. Give it a go and prove me right.
NBA League Pass is a subscription-based service that allows you to watch live games online in HD with a full season’s worth of archives. Their cheapest plan, called “Choice,” runs at $119.95 (payment plan available). With this plan you can choose 7 teams to follow throughout the regular season. For $70 more, you can get the Premium package and watch the entire league. What I like about NBA League Pass is that you can catch any game you missed with its full season archive. Now you and I can watch every game of the Miami Heat, a walking highlight reel, whenever we want.
MLB.TV exemplifies baseball anywhere, anytime. All 2,430 regular season games and over 150 spring training games are live in HD. With all the bells and whistles included, you can also connect to this via your Playstation3. Since pricing has changed from year to year (thankfully it has gone down), you’ll have to check back in around mid-April when the 2011-2012 MLB season begins. This past year it was about $120.
Though the 2010 postseason is over, MLB Postseason.TV will be back in 2011 and gets a special mention here because it’s a stand alone service from MLB.TV. For $9.99 you get all the postseason action with up to four additional camera angles and sound. What’s great about this service is that there are no blackouts!
Dan Patrick Show Direct is a paid subscription service that allows you to watch every live show of The Dan Patrick Show live from your computer. Now that you’re a cord cutter the highlight reels, interviews, news and information from SportsCenter will become a thing of the past. The Dan Patrick Show, a highly-regarded national sports radio show, can help you fill that gap. The monthly subscription of $7.95 gets you three hours, Monday through Friday, of all the news, humor and analysis you can handle. Dan and the Dan-ettes make workdays fly on by.
Sometimes there is such a thing as a free lunch. Here are some free shows available exclusively online from major networks to make your live sports experience more pleasurable:
Occasionally, TNT decides to deliver an array of additional and unique coverage for their NBA primetime match-ups and makes it available online for free. You get the TV broadcast as well as all the sights and sounds in HD quality, PiP, and four cam view. Be sure to check back here weekly, so that you can stay on top of all the TNT prime time double-headers.
Sunday Night Football Extra
Sunday Night Football Extra is a live video broadcast of NBC’s Sunday Night Football. You get the all the same action, production value and critically acclaimed sports announcers as you would on your television set. The perks are in the sideline cams, the up-to-the-second stats tracker and the crystal clear picture quality. Any games that you can’t find on NFL Sunday Ticket To-Go can be found here, and at a reasonable price… because they’re free.
March Madness on Demand has partnered with CBS to bring you every game of every round from the NCAA Championship Tournament at no cost! Since most games vary in area coverage and start during work hours, this has been a great addition to live sports programming. What makes it even sweeter is that you can watch every game of every round from the past 10 years (2000-2010) of the NCAA Championship Tournament from the NCAA Vault.
With more and more networks expected to provide much more sports programming live online, there will be no shortage of options for sports fans who are looking to become cord-cutters to pick and choose how they root for their teams.
