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How to watch NFL Season games

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This article is sponsored by Verizon.

If you have a cable subscription and live near your home team, then watching all 18 weeks this NFL season is easy: just tune to FOX, NBC, CBS, ESPN, or use one of their apps to stream the game to your phone. But if you’re reading this, odds are you’re a cord-cutter or live out-of-market and need to know how to stream this week’s game online. There are plenty of ways you can catch the action, or at least get this week’s highlights. Here’s how.

NFL Network

The National Football League offers a number of viewing packages. The most comprehensive is NFL Sunday Ticket, which gives you every single Sunday game. Unfortunately, this package is limited to DirectTV subscribers, and it costs at least $294 per season.

For $99 a year, you can opt for Game Pass instead, which gives you access to out-of-market games—with one catch: games are only available after they originally air. Still, this is a good option for, say, a Bills fan who left the snow for a warmer city that doesn’t broadcast every game Josh Allen plays.

Another official option is NFL’s Red Zone, which can be added to most cable (and many streaming) subscriptions for about $5 per month. This is a steal for some, but know that, as the name suggests, coverage is limited to highlights and scoring plays across all games playing at any given time.

If you don’t have cable, don’t fret—most of NFL’s options are available on streaming services like Hulu, Sling TV, and fuboTV.

Streaming Services and Network Apps

For Sunday games, check out Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access), a streaming service that gives you access to every weekend game carried by CBS—in other words, AFC home games. Unfortunately, NFC fans are stuck with Fox, which means you’ll be limited to local games as the network doesn’t have a comparable package.

On Thursday nights, Fox Sports and Fox Now both stream games via their apps, and season 11 Thursday night games will also be available on Amazon Prime. This year, if you want the remaining eight Thursday night games without a cable subscription, you’ll need a Hulu + Live TV subscription ($65/month). Add on the sports pack ($10/month) for additional NFL Red Zone coverage on weekends. But starting in 2022, all Thursday night games will be on Amazon Prime.

For Monday Night Football, check out any streaming service or cable provider that gives you access to ESPN.

VPN

The major limitation to cable and network options is that you’re limited to the games in your home market. That won’t help you if you live far from your home team. The good news is that you can use a VPN to reroute your internet through a market televising the game you want to watch. The bad news is that many providers discourage or even block this, so check your terms of service first.

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