Now Streaming American Football Is Almost as Easy as Streaming British Football

Tom Brady via Flickr

It’s really, really easy to stream any American football game to your computer, but it’s not always easy to do it well. If you’re not interested in what the local station or bar is showing on a Sunday afternoon—but also don’t have cable or satellite—there are dozens of dubious-looking European websites where you can find another game being streamed from somewhere like Arkansas or Skysports in the UK, available at just the cost of closing a series of pop-up windows and at a quality that varies between “looks like an impressionist painting of football” and “why would this freeze right now?”

But for the first time this year, CBS will spare you the agony of clicking through those ads for sexy local singles NEAR YOU and will stream much of the playoffs through CBSsports.com. Starting Sunday when the Cincinnati Bengals take on the San Diego Chargers, and continuing through the AFC’s divisional games and up to the conference championship, you can watch the games live through a presumably much clearer stream.

This seems years overdue and a real no-brainer. The number of streaming sites speaks to the demand online, but so far, of the major American broadcast networks, NBC seems the most proactive about opening another revenue stream with sports. It streams American football on Sunday nights as well as English Premier League soccer, which makes being an English soccer fan easier in America than it is in England, according to Motherboard soccer fan Alec Liu.

CBS broadcast the Super Bowl online last year, which was how I watched it. One strange quirk of doing so, other than when the electricity of the Super Bowl went out, was that the much hyped, expensive Super Bowl commercials weren’t broadcast to the online audience. We instead were treated to what felt like the same three commercials over and over for four hours. It was pretty counterintuitive—why wouldn’t CBS want to add online viewership to the nationally broadcast millions-of-dollar beer ads, and charge even more for ad time?

But then the NFL is pretty much the most lucrative thing that broadcast television has, and it operates to keep football a scarce and thus valuable entity. That means that something like the NFL Gamepass, which streams every game in HD for 214 euros, remains unavailable in the United States, even though we’re so football crazed that we’d shell out however many euros it takes. But NFL Gamepass isn’t available here or in Mexico, so we’re left trying to run patchwork VPNs to make our computers look Dutch, or going to sports bars.

You might be wondering, like anyone who is facing down the prospect of watching the Bengals, why the NFC playoffs aren’t getting the same treatment and will have to be streamed deviously. Fox has NFL broadcast rights to the NFC playoff games, and paid $1.1 billion to retain the privilege through 2022, but the rights to broadcast the NFC to laptops, phones, and tablets don’t kick in until next season. So if you wanna watch the 49ers run all over the Packers this weekend, you’ll have to do so the old-fashioned way: dubious Euro-streams.