A question that comes up often this time of year is where can I watch live NFL football games online for free? The unpopular answer is that there is no legal way to watch NFL football online for free. The key words are "for free."
The monopoly of the National Football League
The National Football League owns broadcasts of NFL football games and maintains an anti-piracy unit for the purpose of protecting what they consider to be their copyrighted property. The National Football League licenses just one outlet for the broadcast of their games, DirecTV.
DirecTV has the NFL Sunday Ticket which broadcast games on television using the DirectTV satellite system. If you do not have DirecTV and cannot get DirecTV they do offer a service called "NFL Sunday Ticket To-Go" which offers live streaming video of every NFL Sunday Ticket game. This streams the programming directly to your home computer or mobile device at a cost of $350 for the entire football season.
The only legal way to to watch streaming NFL games online is through DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket. If you do the math, the NFL season runs roughly five months, so $350 divided by five months, comes to a price of $70 a month. Many streaming outlets offering other types of programming are a fraction of this cost.
Many unauthorized outlets
If you search hard enough you will find websites that have links to watch live NFL football games online for free. These sites use a variety of methods to illegally rebroadcast the video streams of the NFL games online. The video quality is anywhere from fair to downright terrible, and the signals often break up during the game.
Getting something for nothing does not come without risks to your computer and personal information. If the site asks to you download software to be able to watch the game, ask yourself this question, what incentive do you have to trust a site that is helping you to do something it knows is illegal. As a matter of common practice you should never download software from a site you do not completely trust.
Should you be lucky enough to find a site that connects you to a feed to your NFL game, there is a good chance that site might not make it through the season, as sites are often shutdown for copyright violations. The NFL anti-piracy unit even goes as far as activitely looking for links to sites broadcasting NFL games and works to have these sites removed from search engines under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
What can you do?
Many folks would just like to watch their favorite team when it is out of the local market, and would be willing to pay a nominal fee to watch the games online.
At $350 per season, divide that by 16 games in a season, that comes out to more than twenty dollars per weekend. Not a great bargain for a sports fan looking to watch the games of their favorite team online.
Unfortunately the sports fan looking to watch games has little recourse other than to complain. Write a letter to the NFL about the monopoly they have created with only licensing their product. Write a letter to the FCC asking them to take a serious look at the way they have allowed one media outlet, DirectTV, to monopolize the rights to a popular network.
The addresses below to the National Football League and Federal Communication Commission.
File A Complaint with the FCC using their website, or use the snail mail method at: Federal Communications Commission, Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, 445 12th Street SW, Washington, D.C. 20554
Tell NFL commissioner Roger Goodell what you think of their monopoly. National Football League offices are located at 280 Park Ave., 15th Fl., New York, NY 10017 Phone: 212-450-2000 Fax: 212-681-7573.
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