
The HBO Max app may be terrible, but The Sopranos is not, and it is right there for you at any hour of the day on any device. Whatever problems might exist with regular old streaming of movies and TV, the user experience is mostly good. Even when your team wins, you end up as the loser. The experience of being a fan is now more expensive, more annoying, and more transactional. But in sports, the streaming gold rush has largely done the opposite. In the entertainment world, the promise has by and large held up.

We could keep watching the things we enjoyed-and more-without the commitment of cable. The whole promise of streaming, in sports and beyond, was that it was supposed to make our lives easier and less expensive. The present is about paying more and more money to maintain what you had while being occasionally flummoxed about where to find it.
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The past was about readily accessible games on TV and an add-on for the most committed fans who wanted to stay in touch with teams that were far away. The biggest leagues, such as the NFL and MLB, already offer expensive but useful packages to watch games that aren’t in your local market, but now all sorts of sports are getting far deeper in the streaming business. With ever fewer exceptions, it is no longer possible to watch all of your favorite team’s games with only a cable-TV subscription or a digital look-alike, such as YouTube TV. The sports-streaming monster had come for me, and maybe it’s come for you too. A Good Samaritan sent me a password, and I logged on just in time to miss all the fun and see Toledo boot away the game with poor defense and clock management. By that point, it was late in the fourth quarter and I was getting desperate. The game was only on NBC’s streaming platform, which costs $4.99 a month. Even before I could Google it, my Twitter feed reminded me of the problem: I had been Peacocked.

First I flipped over to NBC, where Notre Dame’s home games are generally aired. So last September, when the Fighting Irish were in danger of losing to the University of Toledo Rockets, 16.5-point underdogs, I knew I had to watch. Few things are more satisfying for a certain type of college-football fan than a Notre Dame loss, and all the better if it’s an upset.
