With the rise of streaming services in the last 10 years, watching preferred channels and shows has become very inconvenient and expensive. 

At the start of cable television in the 1950s, all channels and shows that were on TV were contained in one package, which customers paid for either monthly or annually. That is how it was for decades, up until around 2010, when Netflix and Amazon Prime were rising in popularity as on-demand streaming services. 

The new streaming services made it so that viewers could watch most shows on demand, and the sheer number of available shows available for streaming made cable look inferior and outdated.  This was the start of the downfall of basic television.

Before long, many more new streaming services came about: Hulu, Disney +, Peacock, and hundreds more.

Then, cable-like streaming services, such as YouTube TV and Fubo TV, appeared, offering customers 50 to 60 different channels at half the price of cable. A common feature of these streaming services is that each one of them is missing a few channels that most households watch. Perhaps it was by design, as customers were enticed to pay for more add-ons or other services.

One of the biggest genres of television has recently been hit with many complicated and expensive ways to watch: the NFL now has certain games exclusively on certain services and channels.

All Thursday Night Football games are now shown on Amazon Prime video, which entails a $14.99/month cost. As the NFL regular season lasts five months, it now costs $75 per season just to watch one game per week.

The NFL will also have 22 games in the 2024-2025 season that are exclusively streamed on Peacock, with a monthly price of $7.99.

Also, if the viewer does not live in the same area as the team that they support, they most likely will be unable to watch their games because they cannot be found on the local CBS or FOX channels. However, one solution is to purchase the NFL Sunday Ticket for a staggering $479 per season. This also does not include the ability to watch any of the games that are exclusively on Amazon Prime or Peacock. 

After calculating the total price of all the expenses, the final price per season would be about a soaring 600 dollars.

This price increase is not exclusive to sports coverage. For more and more shows, exclusive streaming rights are the norm, making it seem that the only way to be able to watch all of the shows we like is to subscribe to all of the streaming services. The price just keeps growing.

Sure, streaming has ushered a new era of television, an era that certainly has its benefits. But it’s too hard to ignore the fact that streaming has made watching TV more difficult and more expensive.