[kevin993]

Timely post. Over the past few years, we'd gotten to enjoy more of the EPL and Bundesliga. We often recorded a bunch of the weekend games and then worked through a few during the week. We started to know more of the teams and players. We didn't re-arrange our schedule to watch them, but we'd have a match on if we were home. If we were busy that weekend or week, we just missed that weekend or week. No big deal.

Bundesliga has gone behind the paywall at ESPN. NBC shows more EPL games but they've cut back significantly compared to last year. You can't really follow one team week-to-week, so you take whatever games they choose to show.

We're casual enough spectators that we'll pay attention if it is there but won't go out of our way to pay extra. If it isn't available, we'll find plenty of other things to do with our time and attention. Maybe it is worth it for the hard-core fans but our life is fluid enough that it doesn't make sense to pay extra when we may or may not be watching for a week or two or three at a time. If you don't care about watching live, you can typically catch up later with replays or highlight shows online to scratch the itch.

I'm also not interested in paying for the privilege of being shown teaser games and constant advertisements to pay more for the "good" games or the teams I want to see. (Yes, I understand the move to streaming, economics, etc. but it is annoying to hear "peacock" pushed repeatedly along with descriptions of all of the good games that I'm not seeing.)

There may not be right or wrong, but there are consequences. There is a big world out there with almost unlimited supply of interesting people, places and experiences. It gets more and more difficult to command pricing power. We like a lot of things, but not at any cost.