Fractured Streaming So Bad Injured NFL Players Turn To Illicit Streams To Watch Their Own Teams

It was only a few weeks ago that we were discussing how, thanks to how fractured streaming has become, watching NFL games is becoming more and more an expensive and complicated process. It’s gotten so bad that ESPN has released an app designed specifically just to help viewers find where to watch the NFL game they’re interested in. But finding it alone doesn’t mean you can watch it, what with the labyrinthian landscape of different cable and streaming providers the NFL has negotiated to show its games. The point is not only that this is getting far too expensive for fans, but that there is a mental transactional cost associated with all of this as well.

And, as it turns out, it’s not just fans. After encountering all of these same challenges while injured, Seattle Seahawks cornerback Tariq Woolen accidentally revealed that he was watching his own team via an illicit streaming site.

All that is to say that it’s not wild to see injured Seattle Seahawks cornerback Tariq Woolen using a pirate streaming service to watch his team’s own games (seemingly first caught by X/Twitter user Doxx). You can put that next to his salary of more than $1 million per year, as NFL news poster Dov Kleiman did, and look for obvious chuckles.

But even with a lot of income at his disposal, streaming a game is just not very easy, even if you play for an NFL team. Witness the numerous knowing and sympathetic replies to Woolen’s coy admission, along with reprimands for revealing his reliable stream source.

As the post notes, Woolen isn’t poor. The decision to go about watching the game this way can’t be a purely financial one. Instead, what is almost certainly the case is that Woolen encountered the same pretzel that is how to watch the game he wanted and gave up, realizing that the illicit streams are providing that service much better than the league in which he plays.

And that’s ridiculous. You would expect Woolen to be mocked or criticized for streaming the game this way when he’s making $1 million a year. Instead, it seems most of the response to all of this was sympathy and irritation that he might get that streaming service DMCA’d.

And what’s more, even for an NFL player, the NFL couldn’t provide him with a way to watch all the league’s games even if it wanted to.

Woolen himself may not have a larger argument with availability versus prices. Responding to Kleiman’s salary/streaming call-out, Woolen wrote: “It’s free it’s for me,” prepended by two “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. But even if the NFL wanted to provide players like him with a legitimate option to stream every game, from anywhere in the US, on any given day, it could not, because it does not exist.

Except it does, in the form of illicit streaming sites. Sites that are essentially providing what customers demand because the league just won’t. And if that isn’t ridiculous enough of an example for how this is all going to become a wider problem, then nothing will.