How the streaming dream turned sports on TV into a costly maze

Fans face paying hundreds of dollars to follow their teams on television in some areas. Composite: Getty, Alamy There was a moment, perhaps a decade ago, when it felt as if sports broadcasting nirvana was near. A world where ordinary fans could access any game on any device, any time, anywhere.

Or near enough, as cord-cutting devastated traditional cable subscription models and viewers who had long been locked into expensive and restrictive TV packages now had choices. Streaming nurtured a diverse and bespoke landscape. At some point, though, the age of abundance became the era of excess.

Too many services offering too many subscriptions for too much money with too many commercials. What once seemed like a clear and fair proposal for fans – only pay for what you really want to watch, and cancel when you like – mutated into complexity, cost and confusion. This is especially evident in Major League Baseball.

It was the bedrock of regional sports networks on old-school cable TV, valued for the predictable rhythm of its 162-game regular season: with rare exceptions, the same team on the same local channel with the same commentators, day-in, day-out. This season, seven providers – traditional broadcasters as well as Apple TV – carry games nationally depending on the day, and the picture is blurry for fans in some local markets who are subject to old-fashioned blackouts and have endured channel churn as failing regional sports networks restructure and rebrand at a dizzying rate. In the New York area most Yankees games stream on the Gotham Sports App, which reduced its prices in February amid criticism of its buggy performance.