So here’s some notes and thoughts about my experience trying to watch football today, the first Sunday of the football season.
As I’ve previously mentioned, I don’t have any “traditional” TV service this year, having discontinued YouTube TV. But I ponied up for NFL+ Premium and the new ESPN Unlimited service.
So, for pregame shows, I was switching between the NFL network pregame show and the ESPN one. Both are reasonably good. One thing I hadn’t considered about this setup is that I no longer have anything resembling a DVR; I can’t pause, fast-forward, or rewind any of this stuff. And it’s harder to switch between “channels”, since I’m now switching between apps.
For the actual games, I decided to try watching NFL RedZone. That was actually pretty cool; I’d never had access to it before. It’s a little too “busy” for me; I’d rather see more of each game and less switching back and forth. But it’s fun and really gives you a lot of coverage of all the games.
There was a lot of grumbling recently about the announcement that they’d have commercials during RedZone this year. What I saw wasn’t really a big deal though; I think there was one very short commercial during the whole first hour of RedZone.
Speaking of commercials: another thing I miss about not having any DVR ability is never being able to fast-forward through commercials. I was watching NFL Matchup on ESPN this morning, and, despite it being a show I was watching on-demand, there were commercials in it and no way to skip them. I may be misremembering, but I think, in previous years, whenever I’d watch NFL Matchup via ESPN+, it would be commercial-free.
The Giants and Jets have, of course, both lost their first game. I don’t think this is going to be a good year for the Giants, but hopefully it’ll be better than last year.