More Live Sports on Free TV, and Some from Formerly Cable TV, Now Easily Accessible Everywhere Else for Free
And on this front after years of simply doing little or fighting losing battles, both Fox and NBC are waving the white flag to some degree instead of trying to charge people money to watch on other devices than a big screen and to have them subscribe to whatever, but free app downloads are becoming more popular along these lines.
Rather than indirectly subsidize the pirate sites and lose all that ad revenue, Fox and Comcast have simply decided to put what is already free on regular TV to be accessible free anywhere else.
Now it took them a very long time to figure that out instead of trying to get people to sign up for something that is otherwise free and then to pay for it simply because they are not watching on a TV at home, and it’s taken them a decade to figure this out and millions in wasted resources, including on the legal front, but some greedy media executives are who they are after all and generally behind the times with technology as well.
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Fox seems to be moving much of its live sports content, like the NFL playoffs right now, right on its website during the game, much as Fox did for the World Cup games in late 2022 and other sports ever since. There is a time limit of one hour, but one can clear cookies to restart the clock. Then there is a free app for content via the website and also some new sports coverage on Tubi, which basically makes that steaming hot piece of trash that is the cable channel FS1 obsolete along with all those bojacks and bojills still with airtime on there for no good business reason.
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NBC has done as noted in the previous post to move more sports content, including live sports, away from their crappy Peacock app, which they appear to be phasing out or perhaps making it perhaps more centred on non-sports entertainment in an integration with Xumo or a rebranded interface.
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CBS seems to make much work far more easily with Paramount+ and Pluto TV along with on the CBS sports website. What’s coming next that is more integrated, via the new ownership, is likely not until 2026 at the earliest.
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Disney and ABC? Well it’s going to be a while as they figure out what to do, including with their crappy ESPN+ app that far fewer care about any more and all those overpaid blowhards on ESPN, now all salespeople for ESPN Bet.