Crossing Broad
Mid-July. Basketball’s been over for a month; free agency has been going for over a week. Baseball is in full swing. The All-Star break is quickly approaching. Crickets chirp all day. Cicadas sing their song into the night. The heat has become thicker. The humidity weighs on your shoulders. That feeling is coming back, slowly but surely…
Football is approaching.
Training camp begins in only a few weeks. You don’t even need to Google it. The human body just knows. You can tell by the way the sun hangs in the sky; your natural circadian rhythm at work. An ancient evolutionary marvel. We instinctively know when the NFL begins. We know that it’s soon.
With that knowledge comes an excitement, a giddiness, thoughts of slow-cooked chili and Tostitos chips offset by the cool autumn breeze rolling through open windows. But for many Eagles fans, the march toward that first kickoff also comes with a quiet dread.
Not every Eagles fan lives in the Philadelphia area. Not every Eagles fan has cable or YouTubeTV. For these sorry souls, as July hints at August, an awful question forms in the pit of their stomach, rises into their strained throats, and sticks in the front of their mind until September finally arrives:
Where the hell can I watch Eagles games?
For well over a decade, the answer has been a shrug. No one seems to know. There are currently 204 streaming services. Some are small-time. They have strange names, words that are not words. Fubo. Roku. Tubi. Bluto. Renko. Trolli. Vue. Raff. Planeto. Sqwair. Then there are the common ones, the big dogs, the enemies we keep close: Netflix. Hulu. Apple. YouTube TV. Amazon. HBO Max. In your mind, these services are semi-affordable. But you haven’t been paying attention. They’ve been moving in the shadows, jacking up their prices while you slept. Each of them now costs $18.99 a month. By the time this blog runs, they may have upped it to $22.99. By the end of August, it could be $34.99.
And they won’t let you share passwords anymore…
This isn’t a new problem. Crossing Broad has written about it many, many times, and to me, it’s long seemed unsolvable. Us peasants are no match for the rich. The powers that be make the rules; without a say or a choice, we have to play their game.
Until now… Possibly…
This website is called HuddleMaxx. The site builds subscription plans for sports fans either in-market or out-of-market, in an effort to maximize cost-savings and streamline the subscription craziness:
The gist is that HuddleMaxx creates a “watch path” that goes game-by-game and essentially tells you what you need, when you need it, and when to cancel it. This is based on your zip code, so it cobbles together the best plan based on whether you’re in the local market, or outside of it:
There’s another section that explains the math, next to a drop down menu that allows you to select what services...
