I cut the cord 5 years ago now. I haven't looked back. Live sports is really the ONLY thing I miss, but you can go out to dinner at a bar a couple times a month for what cable was charging you.
Same here. And the best thing about it is how little time I spend watching crappy TV. What I do watch, I watch on purpose at the time I choose. And even buying TV shows to watch current seasons, I still only spend about 50% of what I used to spend on cable, including Netflix and Amazon subscriptions (and Amazon shouldn't really count since I don't buy it for the video access).
I'm a pretty big fan of the EPL and soccer generally like you. I go to at least one Spurs match at WHL every year, and most weekends will watch 3 or 4 other games and a bunch of highlights.
I cut the cord in 2009, but to be honest it was a little easier back then.
foxsoccer.tv had the live streaming rights to every EPL match and had them all on demand for replay. The web service was truly awful and a lot of times a stream would break in various ways but it was "good enough".
ESPN had the champions league in those days, so I had to "borrow" my parents cable credentials to watch.
Can't remember where I watched UEFA Cup at the time, but Fox Soccer may have had the rights.
Things have changed a bit, with NBC owning EPL rights now. I can only watch by continuing to "borrow" a friend or relative's cable subscription creds.
But the NBC sports streaming service seems to no longer show all the EPL games, and certainly almost none are available on demand. So I've lost so much trust that I just go to reddit.com/r/footballdownload directly when I want to watch something.
ESPN has most international matches, Euro/WC qualifiers, friendlies etc. Still need to log in with a cable subscription.
BeIN has a bunch of content too, like Bundesliga and La Liga and Serie A. But for some reason a Comcast xfinity credential doesn't get you web-based access. A few other cable provider accounts do though.
Sooo, to sum up after writing all this I'm realizing that it's pretty terrible unless you're willing to use a friend's cable subscription credentials, or you're willing to watch replays on an illegal streaming site.
I also cut cable 8 years ago and haven't turned back.
It was hard at first for sports because I had to watch random internet streams that were often bad quality, getting shutdown or full of browser ads (just use adblocker.)
In the last few years it has gotten a lot better. Almost every network has an AppleTV/Amazon Fire/Hulu app or online streaming service with cable quality streaming. Most of them require you to have cable subscription, but thats easily circumvented by using a friend's TV login.
I stopped my cable subscription a couple of years ago. I bought an antenna for live sports. I watch football, and my team is always broadcast on a local channel (I believe that it is always like that for NFL, because they know that they need to ensure their core fans can watch the game). I don't watch other sports much so I don't know how well this strategy would work.
You can have local blackouts if they don't sell enough of the seats in the stadium. It doesn't happen a lot, unless you live in the Jacksonville market.
On March 23, 2015, the NFL's owners voted to
suspend the blackout rules for the 2015 NFL
season, meaning that all games will be
televised in their home markets, regardless
of ticket sales
It's not coming back. There was a lot of political pressure for this to happen, and the NFL isn't totally tone deaf.
That's just what you do when you have a monopoly. Your customers can't go anywhere else to get your product, so it doesn't matter as much how you treat them.
It's a monopoly without lockin, though. It's entirely possible for customers to just stop being customers, which seems like the likely result of abusive behavior.
The same could be said of religion. But people seem to have a pretty strong need to participate in that kind of thing. They often make it a very strong part of their identity.
