The federal government could soon reshape how millions of Americans watch live sports on TV by overhauling a decades-old antitrust law in an attempt to rein in soaring costs.
Earlier this year the Federal Communications Commission, the regulatory agency that oversees most forms of communication, announced it was seeking public comments on the live sports viewing experience, which has been radically transformed by streaming services in recent years.
Some lawmakers have also signaled a willingness to modernize the licensing rulebook in order to account for the emergence of streaming giants like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix.
Watching live sports — particularly flagship games like the NFL playoffs — costs more than ever. Surveys reveal mounting frustrations among American fans facing steeper fees and piecemeal access.
“The thing that’s getting lost in some of this discussion is the broader economics of sports,” a media consultant who focuses on streaming told The Hill. “The leagues are pretty clearly not interested in doing what’s best for fans. And why would they [be] when people continue to pay to see games on all of these services?”
Why sports fans are fed up
Many fans have cut the cord on cable bundles, turning to streaming services like Roku and YouTube TV for sports games. Comcast, Paramount, and Disney have all rolled out their own direct-to-consumer streaming platforms.
Some 43 percent of U.S. households with Internet access watch sports, and 70 percent use a streaming platform, according to a 2025 by market research firm Parks Associates.
An Associated Press poll the same year found that 60 percent of sports “super fans” subscribe to sports-only streaming services like MLB TV or ESPN+.
This splintered streaming environment has driven the cost of watching live sports to record highs. Americans who wanted to watch every NFL game last season were forced to shell out at least $1,000 and subscribe to nearly a dozen different services in order to do so, according to the FCC’s own estimates.
Such lofty price tags have turned off many viewers. According to the AP poll, roughly half the people who follow sports, at least “somewhat” closely, said they’re dissatisfied with the amount of money they have spent.
Randy Alavarez, a 35-year-old Los Angeles-area resident, told the outlet that, after getting rid of cable in 2022, his “hodgepodge” streaming approach has meant he’s missed games due to soaring costs.
“The lack of availability of local games makes me not an avid watcher,” John So, a 45-year-old Texan who also relies on streaming, also told the AP. “The fact I need to pay an extra $15 or $16 a month for the local sports network package is a disincentive for me to become an active watcher.”
What the FCC is trying to do
On February 25, the FCC announced it was opening a public comment period for sports broadcasting practices.
“For decades, Americans have enjoyed turning on their television sets and quickly finding the games they wanted to watch for free on an over-the-air broadcast,” the agency said. “Yet watching your favorite sports team play is not as easy these days.”
Over the past few years, sports coverage has increasingly moved behind paywalls on streaming platforms, the FCC noted. While this expands options for fans, many viewers now struggle to locate desired games and must subscribe to multiple services to access them.
The agency is specifically seeking comment until April 13 on local blackout restrictions. A “sports blackout” occurs when an event that was supposed to be televised is not aired in a specific media market, typically due to contractual agreements, according to the FCC.
Many analysts view this public comment period as the opening step toward revising the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, according to The Hill.
I can’t help but think of the older sports fan who is maybe retired and, say, the Mets game is the highlight of their day or their week, and now they can’t find it or pay for another platform they maybe can’t afford.
That legislation gave professional sports leagues like the NFL, MLB and NBA an antitrust exemption so they could pool their teams’ television rights and sell them as a single, league‑wide package to national networks.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who has been accused of politically-motivated censorship, including by asking broadcasters to “take action” against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel last year, has publicly grumbled over the current sports broadcasting model.
"Americans are frustrated when they sit down and can’t find the game they want to watch,” Carr told Fox News last month. “And that feeling grows only worse when they realize that they might need to sign up for another streaming service to watch the game.”
There are limits to what the FCC can do, though. The regulatory agency lacks jurisdiction over tech platforms like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.
‘I can’t help but think of the older sports fan’
Sports media insiders and experts have long bemoaned the downstream effects of the shift from cable to streaming.
“Sports are one of the last things people are watching live. People still care and they want to watch these games,” Olivia Stomski, the director of Syracuse University’s Newhouse Sports Media Center, told The Hill.
“I can’t help but think of the older sports fan who is maybe retired and, say, the Mets game is the highlight of their day or their week, and now they can’t find it or pay for another platform they maybe can’t afford.”
Some lawmakers have urged Congress to do more to limit the outsized leverage that top leagues wield when negotiating media‑rights deals.
Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, has said the decades-old Sports Broadcasting Act needs to be reexamined.
“The modern distribution environment differs substantially from the conditions that precipitated this exemption,” Lee said in a letter addressed to Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department.
Some broadcasting corporations have also weighed in on potential regulatory changes.
Fox, the Rupert Murdoch-owned media company that is one of the largest commercial broadcasters of live sports in the U.S., noted in an FCC filing that “there could be a dramatic impact on both consumers and local journalism if [streaming] became the default means by which Americans watch live sports.”
“In a world where Big Tech acquires more and more broadcast sports rights—often as a loss leader to support other massive, vertically integrated businesses that primarily profit off of the personal consumption data of its customers—fans across the country could be ‘paywalled’ out of the Fall Classic, Thanksgiving football, or Team USA’s victories in the Olympics or the World Cup,” the company wrote.
However not all are on board with altering the FCC’s blackout restrictions or revising the sports broadcasting law. Some have noted that such changes could lead to additional chaos for fans.
“There are real problems with extending the SBA to streaming services,” Kellie Lerner, an antitrust attorney, told The Hill. “If Congress is going to go that direction, you can’t just invalidate it with no solution or we’re going to end up worse off than we are now, which is already pretty bad.”
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