The cost to watch the NFL...A lot!

NBC's Rory O'Neill reports on the expense of streaming games. Plus, HBO Max is setting traps for people sharing passwords

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Friday morning, six forty six, Mike Elliott, Columbus's Morning News.
Let's check in with our pal on the Legacy Retirement
Group dot com phone line. He is Rory O'Neill, NBC
News Radio. Happy Friday, Rory, We've got the Yeah, the
NFL is underway preseason anyway, the Bengals lost last night
to the to the Eagles.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
I think the.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Browns are tonight there, as Matt just said in Carolina.
But the NFL is they're not just on network TV anymore.
They have a lot of different options to watch that
in some streaming platforms, and it's gonna cost you this season.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Well, for the first time, fans can stream every nationally
and locally televised NFL game, and it is expensive, as
you said, imagining you don't have a TV with an antenna.
You're probably just living off your phone because you're gen
z and that's what you kids do. But it's going
to run you about one hundred eleven dollars per month,

(00:57):
or six hundred and seventy one dollars at every game
from September through February.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
That's yeah, you've got to be You've got to be
a dedicated NFL fan. I mean, I'll watch my teams
that I'm interested in, you know, the Bengals, the Browns,
the Detroit Lions. But after that it's on in the background.
For me, I'm not really unless it's a nail bier
type of game, I'm not. And even if I was way,
way way into every single NFL game, hundred bucks a

(01:24):
month for the season, that's steep it is.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
And look, it's still more expensive though to go to
the local sports bar and watch it too. So you're
sort of stuck in terms of, you know, how do
you watch all these games? Because now look ESPN DTC
the director consumer version, that's thirty bucks a month to
watch Monday Nights football and the games air on ABC,
Amazon Prime. If you want to watch Thursday Night football,

(01:48):
that's fifteen bucks, Peacock is twelve, Paramount Plus is twelve,
Fox One is twenty, and even Netflix you need that
to watch the Christmas Day games, and of course that's
twenty three bucks a month.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Yeah, and they and they make it so you have to.
I mean they do this with Ohio State football too.
Is they'll put it on Peacock here and there, and
they'll do these these one off streaming games that force
you to go and get a subscription and hopefully from
their viewpoint that you forget to cancel it because then
they can keep getting your cash month to month. But
a lot of people jump on by the by they

(02:22):
get the platform for a game, and then they cancel it.
Another story that you're covering this morning is HBO max
is getting a little slick setting traps for people who
share passwords. How's this working well?

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Right? So look, for a few months now, they've been
nudging people like, hey, you might want to get your
own account or maybe upgrade to a family account so everyone,
so they know that you're sharing passwords out there, and
they've been gentle and kind about it. But it really
seems that the hammer is going to come down starting
in September, that they're going to crack down on this
password sharing stuff that you know, they Netflix used to

(02:57):
encourage you to share your password when they were still
sort of transitioning from a CD or rather a DVD
company to a streaming service, and now HBO Max is
about to do the same to your earlier point of like,
you know, they're tired of seeing that money trickle through
their fingers