Watching sports in the streaming era can be a fractured and frustrating experience for fans. Leagues have found it immensely lucrative to slice up their schedules and sell portions off to the various streaming services, each of which is desperate for live sports programming. This leaves most fans without a single subscription that covers all the games they want to watch. Instead, you need to cobble together a collection of services and then remember which games are on which service on which nights.
YouTube TV
YouTube TV
Peacock
NBA Prime Video logo
NBA Prime Video logo
Hulu
ESPN
Take the NBA playoffs, for example, where you needed to subscribe to three streaming services to watch nationally televised games on any given night this past season. And this situation carries into the playoffs with games on ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon Prime Video.
If you're more of a diehard fan of your local MLB team and care more about watching its games than catching national broadcasts, you’ll need a regional sports network. And options are limited for cord-cutters. Fubo and DirecTV are the only live TV streaming services that offer a wide selection of RSNs. A better bet for watching baseball is an in-market streaming plan for your team.
Given the range of sports and sports fans, it’s impossible to point to one streaming service as the single solution for your sports-watching needs. Most likely, you will need to mix and match. But I do have some good news to share for frustrated fans.
For one, there are no long-term contracts with any of the streaming services, which means you can sign up at the start of the season and cancel your subscription at the end -- or somewhere in the middle if your team is suffering through a rough season to the point you no longer want to watch.
For another, some of the live TV streaming services, including Fubo and DirecTV, have started offering skinny bundles geared towards watching sports. These skinny bundles have a reduced set of channels for a lower monthly cost, which can save you some money (or allow you to deploy some of your sports-watching budget to another streamer you might need). And Sling now offers Day, Weekend and Week passes starting at $5 that let you jump in and out for a specific game or two.
At CNET, we've done the research to help you assemble the best roster of streaming services for the sports and teams you want to watch. You might need to add and subtract from your lineup depending on the season to keep your monthly costs at a reasonable level, but there is probably a small group of streaming services that will work for you on any given month of the year.
Keep reading to see the best streaming services for sports fans and learn which sports each service is best for watching as you map out the best lineup of streamers for the sports and teams you care about.
Best sports streaming services of 2026