I Don’t Know How to Watch Live Sports Anymore

This is the story of how I tried to watch NFL RedZone and spent the next two hours studying up on corporate deals, mergers and acquisitions, bundle promotions, and a mind-boggling assortment of brand names and plan tiers.

Join me as I try to find out who even to pay for the sports I want to watch and how much they want from me.

It’s Sunday and I Want to Watch All of the Football

Everybody keeps buying each other and each other’s brands. In 2025, ESPN launched a “new” streaming service, called ESPN¹, and it bought the rights to show NFL RedZone as part of a bundle with NFL+ Premium.

You’re supposed to be able to get RedZone as part of other bundle offers from other streaming services and cable packages, like Sling, DirecTV, and Hulu + Live TV. So, I thought there must be a way to add it onto one of my existing subscriptions and save a little money.

I watch football and soccer and a bit of basketball and, like, the Olympics. Turns out, I’ve assembled quite the collection of streaming TV subscriptions for live sports over the years.

It’s akin to the tangle of cables clogging the drawer next to my desk, USB-As and Cs and microUSBs and special ones for hard drives and toothbrushes and pencil sharpeners and I don’t remember what else.

I kept needing to add them for specific reasons and now there are too many of them and they’re all a little less valuable (and a little more expensive!).

Here’s my current roster of streaming services relevant to this adventure:

ESPN+	$12	I think it’s still showing soccer cup matches for some leagues?
Disney+	$16	No sports, but a central part of the confusion.
Sling	$46	Previously for Premier League; now mostly for Law & Order SVU and Baywatch. And the NBA on TNT guys although didn't that get cancelled or sold now? Ugh.

With this lineup, there are a few options to add or bundle RedZone:

• Subscribe to NFL+ Premium on its own for $15 a month
• Upgrade ESPN+ to ESPN Unlimited with the NFL+ Premium add-on for $45 a month
• Add the Sports Extra package to Sling for a total of $57 a month

At this point, I’m paying for Disney+ and ESPN+. Can’t I bundle those into the giant conglomerate DISNEY® subscription that unnecessarily includes some flavor of Hulu?²

As an aside, streaming TV websites are mostly terrible. So bad. Have you tried logging in to a streaming service and managing account settings on your phone? Torture. I had to break out the grown-up computer.

I Would Rather a Horrifying Apparition Crawled Out of the Screen and Attacked Me Right Now

I start loading various Disney and ESPN pages, trying to find the bundle I’m looking for.

When I log in to Disney+ and click the button to browse plans, it… takes me to the ESPN website and asks me to log in again. To the same account. Cool. Great work everybody so convenient glad we merged all these things.

It offers me “ESPN Unlimited,” which is “all ESPN networks and ESPN+.” I am currently subscribed to ESPN+, so that sounds basically the same, but it’s $30 to also stream the cable channels. No mention of Disney+ or Hulu.

I go back to the Disney website and find the subscription options. I’m currently subscribed to “Disney+ Premium,” but to manage this I have to go to my Verizon account. Because that’s where I signed up for Disney+ to get some promotion, I don’t know, five years ago?

Great.

Now I’m in Verizon’s FAQ section researching what Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ bundles are.³

Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ sounds like the right bundle, but where’s NFL RedZone? Well, that’s an add-on to the bundle. More more give me more!

Oh. I’m apparently not allowed to upgrade to Verizon’s Disney+ and Hulu and ESPN bundle. Why? I don’t know. It just says it’s no longer available for my account.

I’m guessing it’s because I’d already chosen the lesser Disney+ (solo) subscription, thus unknowingly using up my one credit in the machine.

I can cancel the subscription through Verizon and just sign up for the bundle through Disney. Why not. Back to Disney to try to figure out once and for all what bundle I’d actually need and how it compares to what I’m paying now.

This is where I wind up: a truly absurd chart on Disney support page about plans and pricing with enough brand name variations to give me nightmares.

Relevant to me: the “Disney+, Hulu, ESPN Unlimited Bundle Premium” bundle, $45/month.

And then, a major plot twist: the Disney+, Hulu, Max Bundle (No Ads), $30/month.

Yes, I am also subscribed to HBO Max-not-Go-not-just-Max-and-not-just-HBO. HBO, not even sports related, has now thrust itself brazenly into the story in a leading role.

Scott Hanson Save Me Plz

Before I get to the final standings and, I think, an actual solution, I just want to emphasize what’s happening: I am juggling details for six different subscriptions—one of which (Hulu) I don’t even have and don’t want but might have to acquire—in at least four different permutations.

All this to try to “bundle” NFL RedZone.

What I could’ve done is simply subscribed to NFL+ Premium for $15 per month. But surely, with all this advertising and all these promotions, there’s a way to save a few bucks. You know, for brand loyalty or whatever.

The Final Standings

It was around 4pm when I started this project and it’s now 7:30pm and RedZone will be logging off for the week any minute as the final pre-primetime games tick down. There’s always next week, I guess. I hope.

Here are the four options I’ve come up with:

Current Roster Plus NFL+ Premium

NFL+ Premium	$15
Disney+	$16
ESPN+	$12
HBO Max	$17
Total:	$60

Bundle HBO Max

NFL+ add-on	$11
ESPN Unlimited	$30
Disney+, Hulu, Max bundle	$30
Total:	$71

Bundle ESPN

HBO Max	$17
Disney+, Hulu, ESPN Unlimited with NFL+ add-on	$45
Total:	$62

Use Sling Add-On

Sling sports add-on	$11
ESPN+	$12
Disney+	$16
Total:	$85

By this math, the cheapest option—by $2—is simply adding NFL+ Premium as, yes, ANOTHER STREAMING SERVICE.

The best value is technically the Disney+, Hulu, ESPN Unlimited bundle with the NFL+ add-on because it adds Hulu for just $2 more, but is it really better value if I don’t want or need Hulu? Also isn’t Hulu dead?

Maybe I Won’t Watch Football

After all this, it’ll be easiest and seemingly cheapest to suck it up and just subscribe to NFL+ for a couple months and then cancel it till next season. Underwhelming.

Not to mention that it took almost TWO HOURS of painfully logging in to accounts and checking my credit card statement and doing math to untangle this web of IP and subscription tiers.

I’m not even going to compare streaming TV to buying old-fashioned cable packages, because it doesn’t matter if they were bad or better or worse. The point is: why is this so bad?

When I first subscribed to Sling it was $25 a month and soccer was still on NBC and Fox Sports, so it was a great deal. That wasn’t that long ago. Now it’s all over the place, and I have five different subscriptions for one sport plus a whole new bundle for football.

Maybe instead I should just blow up my TV.

*Note to self and to you: I’ve been switching between browser tabs and subscription management pages and plan comparison charts for so long today, I might’ve gotten any of these numbers wrong and wound up making the incorrect decision in the end. If I did, please let me know. With our combined power, we can make sure the corporations cannot confuse us into paying them more than we should.