Watching the Lions on TV weekly might soon be a lot harder and cost you more money

It's not hard to notice that the NFL is changing quite a bit. There's been a lot of attention paid to the league moving more games over to streaming and having international games. 

For example, to watch the Detroit Lions this year, you need a cable package, a Netflix account, and an Amazon Prime account. That's way more than it used to be when you just needed an antenna. 

The NFL is likely to keep leaning this way. Awful Announcing reported on Tuesday that the NFL could be looking to exit the current TV rights deal that they're in. If and when they do, it won't be until the 2030 season, but things could look significantly different when they look to renegotiate a new deal. 

With the NFL leaning more into streaming, they may look to make more of their weekly games played on streaming services. Just looking at the way that Amazon has acquired things in the past, it's not crazy to suggest that they could come in and outbid Fox or CBS to try to get rights to games that they're playing. Imagine a day's worth of Sunday games on Prime. 

Awful Announcing writer Drew Lerner predicts that the NFL may look to do something in the way of having special games on Sunday go on the streamers like Netflix or Amazon, and the rest going to the traditional stations like Fox or CBS. In that case, if your team is really good, it might be on the streamer. 

Personally, I think the entire TV landscape is moving towards streaming, and by 2030, there may not be such a thing as a cable package, perse. It'll be more like a bunch of services that have bought different channels, and you can watch everything there. Kind of like how HBO Max has The Food Network, HGTV, and Investigation Discovery. What's the point of having a cable package when all that stuff is already on there? 

In that case, those streamers would look to offer up a ton of money to the NFL to get games, and instead of Fox and CBS, you're looking at Netflix and Prime. 

Then you would use the ESPN app for Monday Night Football, Peacock for Sunday Night Football, and then, as Lerner predicts, YouTube for all International games. 

If cable goes away, it could offset the cost of having all these streamers. If it doesn't, then you're adding all that together, and it's going to cost some serious money by the end of the season. We'll see what happens in the coming years.