Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: The complicated world of sports streaming, and Sonos gets chatty.

There are more sports fans than ever, but streaming remains complicated

This week, JJ Watt finally had enough. The former NFL star, who played for the Houston Texans for close to a decade, took to X to declare that he was ready to give up on watching Monday Night Football. “Just frustrating,” Watt posted. “All of it.”

Watt’s ire was caused by the ongoing carriage dispute between Disney and YouTube TV, which resulted in ESPN, and a bunch of other Disney networks, going dark on the Google-owned pay TV service on October 30th. The two companies are fighting over the money YouTube has to pay to carry Disney’s networks, with both rejecting the other side’s demands as unreasonable.

The spat resulted in YouTube TV’s roughly 10 million subscribers not being able to turn into Monday Night Football this week. Some hardcore fans responded by signing up for trials of competing services like Hulu Live or Fubo, but Watt wasn’t having it. “I’m not paying for another streaming subscription,” he pouted.

Watt’s Monday night meltdown is emblematic of the weird world of sports TV in 2025: There are more options than ever to watch matches online, including a growing number of free streams, and streams included with your existing video subscriptions. At the same time, sports streaming is increasingly fragmented. As a result, it’s easier than ever to tune into sports if you’re a casual viewer — but incredibly complex if you’re a hardcore fan dead set on watching every single game of your favorite team and then some.

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