A few years ago, it was possible to bargain-hunt if your primary interest in cable was to watch sports. As recently as 2018, you could cut the cord on your cable contract (easily around $100 a month) and instead pay $35 a month for YouTube TV, which includes all of the big national sports channels and even has an easy DVR function to watch games later. Then the service rose
to $40, then
to $50, and
then to $64.99, all in about two years—not usually because the service got any better, though a handful of newly added Discovery channels were the stated reason for one hike. The proposition that you could save a little money and still watch the sports that were important to you went from sound to impossible with incredible speed, and that was
before outside streaming services became so necessary for a devoted-enough fan.
The companies that own the rights to live games think we care enough about sports to put up with additional bills and price hikes, time and again. If they didn’t get you with Biles trying to win a medal in 2021, they’ll get you with Patrick Mahomes throwing touchdown passes in 2022. Their bet is that, at some point, enough of us will be unable to resist. They are probably right