NBC Sports Network is dead. Long live NBC Sports Network! In the turbulent world of television, streaming, and sports media, the one constant is change, and American fans of the Premier League should expect more change for how they watch English football, starting next week.
But that change should be familiar to most. According to Variety, beginning this Monday, November 17, NBCUniversal is planning on resurrecting NBC Sports Network, a cable and streaming channel, which for years broadcast the majority of Premier League matches that weren’t on network TV. NBC parent company Comcast killed it back in 2021 and moved Premier League games, as well as Olympics and other sports, to USA Network and also their then-fledgeling stand-alone Peacock streaming service, a move that rankled sports fans who had to spring for yet another paid streaming service to watch all of their favorite clubs’ matches.
Now NBCSN is back, but with a twist — the streaming channel will debut, at least at first, only on YouTube TV. Variety hints that the deal is, in part, an attempt by YouTube to influence the ongoing carrier dispute between YouTube TV and Disney, which has led to the removal of ESPN and other Disney channels from YTTV over the past two weeks. NBC said that NBCSN will “soon” also be available on Comcast Xfinity. USA Network, meanwhile, will be part of the spun-off Versant company that was formerly part of NBCUniversal; Versant will launch a USA Sports channel, but it looks as though they will not broadcast Premier League matches, the rights to which remain with NBCUniversal.
According to the release, NBCSN will carry Premier League football matches, Monday night NBA games and the NBA Playoffs, the Olympics Gold Zone whip-around, WNBA games, Big Ten and Notre Dame football games, cycling (including Tour de France), certain major golf tournaments, and the Kentucky Derby.
On one level, if you’re already a YouTube TV subscriber (and haven’t cancelled your subscription already over not having ESPN and ABC) then this is potentially good news. Sports fans who only subscribed to Peacock for Premier League football can now cancel their Peacock subs as streaming life reverts back to the halcyon pre-COVID days where everything you wanted to watch was on one paid service.
For others, it might not be so simple, especially if the carrier deal for NBCSN is limited (for now) to YouTube TV and Comcast Xfinity. That potentially leaves out large swaths of American football fans from being able to legally watch their team play every match. I’d like to think that eventually other carriers will pick up NBCSN, but at least initially that won’t be the case, and I expect that will make a lot of American soccer fans very, VERY upset. The suggestion is that NBCSN will eventually make it to other cable services, but that carrier agreements must be negotiated first, and there isn’t much of a sense of how long that will take.
The assumption is that once NBCSN re-launches, it will immediately become the new (old) home for Premier League sports in the United States. That could be a good thing for some, but it sure seems like at least initially a lot of American sports fans might be left out in the cold, with little recourse on how to legally watch their teams.
