Football season can be very demanding for sports fans, so preparedness is crucial. A good game plan is required to ensure no action is missed. For a “cord cutter”, the inevitable question arises, how can I watch NFL without cable? No worries, I’ve listed out a few plays that will have you warmed up and ready for the bone crunching entertainment! As we’ve said before, no solution is perfect, but watching sports without cable is totally doable.
Typical antenna installed at chimney
The Antenna Play
Your first play for watching the NFL without cable starts with a basic HD antenna. Choosing the best HDTV antenna to start with helps ensure this effort provides good results. These antenna are not terribly expensive, and once properly installed, will provide you some of the best quality images you’ll see anywhere. Typically much better than Comcast or DirecTV can provide. You’ll be pleaseantly surprised how good the picture quality is, and the price is hard to beat! I’ve installed entire systems for less than 50$, your mileage may vary.
The NFL Sunday Ticket Play
Your second play for NFL without cable works on games that aren’t on your local broadcast stations, like those on Sunday. Currently, DirecTV offers the NFL Sunday Ticket as an ad-hoc service, meaning you don’t to be a subscriber to get this package. The Sunday Ticket gives you live access to every out-of-market game, every Sunday! Here’s the catch! DirecTV states “It’s available to anyone that cannot get DIRECTV at their residence due to line-of-sight issues.” Hint: This is easily overcome for most folks, especially those that live in apartments or condominiums that don’t allow balcony or roof attachments for dish mounting (in spite of FCC regulations deflating this position). DirecTV is not interrogating subscribers on their reception capability when signing up for the Sunday Ticket App, they just take your money and give you access.
While the price is a little steep at $250.00, I appreciate the fact that they’ve reduced the package by $100.00 from last year. As an aside, I’ve heard multiple reports that the price is negotiable ($200), so don’t hesitate to ask for a discount. The same subscription also allows you to view the games on your PS3, so at least the money has dual purpose, if you have a PS3 at the house.
What about picture quality?
Picture quality is outstanding on the iPad! On occasion, I experienced a slight degradation in quality, but it seemed to only be intermittent, and not very frequent. Overall, I’d say the stream is very watchable and provides a good user experience. The user interface is easy to navigate and obviously customized for the online viewing experience. I imagine at some point they will rework the app to include more stat’s and hopefully some fantasy football league data.
The AirPlay button
That little square with an arrow pointed up is the AirPlay button. And if it worked all the time, it would be great! Unfortunately, streaming these games to your TV using AirPlay is getting very mixed results from folks. Apparently the NFL has blocked AirPlay streaming from within the App, but some users are reporting AirPlay Mirroring to work. Mirroring requires the use of a special cable that connects your iPad directly to the TV using an HDMI signal. While the quality should be good, I don’t think the screen resolutions will match up properly, so you may have only a small portion of your TV screen showing the game. I’ll be picking up a cable to try this out for myself.
Also worth noting is that the iPhone 5, and it’s counterpart, iOS 6, are in no way compatible with the NFL Sunday Ticket version 1.8.1. Actually, any device running the new iOS 6 breaks the app. If you have an iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, or iPad, DO NOT upgrade your device to iOS 6, or you will be left in the cold waiting on a new release of the Sunday NFL Sunday Ticket App.
If you have comments or suggestions on using the NFL Sunday Ticket App, we would love to hear from you. I’m especially interested to hear about successful use of AirPlay to view Sunday Ticket on a TV. Drop us a note in the comment section below.
How to watch NFL without cable is a post from:Kick Out Cable. Cut the cord from big cable companies and learn how to watch TV and movies online.
