We Should Just Go Back to Cable at This Point

Ok, so this post is a little different from my usual AI posts. I have an actual beef with something, and do you want to know what it is? Streaming services have made it way too hard to watch the sports I care about and I feel like either nobody Is talking about It or no one seems to care? Which... Is odd...

For those not familiar, I love NASCAR and naturally, I'd prefer to watch the races. That’s it. Seems simple enough.

At the beginning of the year, the races were on Fox, and Fubo has Fox, so I could watch. Then the next part of the season moved to Amazon Prime. Ok, cool, I already have Prime Video, so I was still covered.

Then it moved to TNT, which is where things started getting annoying because, of course, I don’t have TNT. So now I have to buy the HBO Max add-on through Amazon Prime Video just to keep watching NASCAR. Fine. Whatever. I can live with that for the moment.

Eventually TNT coverage ends and the races move to USA. Fubo has USA, right? WRONG. Because Fubo is in some kind of contract dispute with NBC, they no longer carry it, so now I have to start a free trial of YouTube TV just to watch the race.

And you know what? YouTube TV is kind of nice. Maybe I’ll just make that my default streaming service. Except now the Red Wings’ new streaming service isn’t going to be offered on YouTube TV. It’s going to be on Fubo, though, so when Red Wings season starts, I’ll have to go back.

This is what streaming has become. I’m not trying to watch every show on every service. I’m trying to watch two sports: NASCAR and the Red Wings, and somehow that requires Fubo, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, YouTube TV, and a rotating collection of free trials and add-ons.

I’m just trying to watch a race, so why does it feel like I need a cable package, three streaming subscriptions, and a lawyer to figure out where it’s airing?

And then, once I finally figured out how to watch the race last week... Tyler Reddick, my favorite driver and the whole reason I wanted to watch in the first place, crashed almost instantly on lap 4. Unreal. I probably spent more time figuring out where to watch the race than he spent actually racing in it. That pretty much sums up this entire streaming mess.

The worst part is that none of these services are really bad on their own. They all have something I want. The problem is that the thing I want keeps moving around: Fox, Amazon, TNT, USA, Fubo, YouTube TV, and then back to Fubo.

At this point, I’m not even sure I’m watching NASCAR anymore. I’m just managing a bunch of streaming subscriptions and hoping one of them has the race. Maybe cable wasn’t so bad after all. At least then I knew where to find it.

end rant.

✌️Steven