How Super Bowl streaming stopped being free

Watching the Super Bowl without cable keeps getting more expensive.

NBC will not offer a free stream of Super Bowl LX in 2026, an NBCUniversal spokesperson confirmed. Instead, cord cutters will need a Peacock Premium subscription, which costs $11 per month for the ad-supported tier. Cable subscribers who want to stream the game can log on to NBC’s apps.

This isn’t the first time NBC has put the big game behind a paywall. It also required a Peacock subscription in 2022, but back then you could still stream the Super Bowl for free on your phone via the NFL or Yahoo Sports apps. (Also, a month of Peacock cost just $5 at the time.)

It wasn’t always this way. In the late 2010s, before pay TV subscriptions entered a free fall, all the networks would stream the Super Bowl free of charge with minimal friction. Over the past five years, they’ve added new layers of complexity, requiring free trials, account sign-ups, and, in NBC’s case, hard paywalls.

Here’s how availability has shifted over the past decade.

• 2016: Free on CBS apps/website
• 2017: Free on Fox apps/website
• 2018: Free on NBC apps/website
• 2019: Free on CBS apps/website
• 2020: Free on Fox apps/website
• 2021: Free on CBS apps/website
• 2022: Peacock or NBC login required on TVs; free on NFL mobile app
• 2023: Free on Fox apps/website
• 2024: Paramount+ required, free trial available
• 2025: Free on Fox’s Tubi app with sign-in
• 2026: Peacock or NBC login required, no trial

This is the first year in which neither the host network nor the NFL will offer any free way to watch the game. The league stopped offering free mobile access in 2022, when it launched its NFL+ streaming service, and Peacock doesn’t offer free trials.

A few free work-arounds still exist. Those who get decent antenna reception from a nearby NBC station or affiliate can watch the Super Bowl for free over the air. Some live TV streaming services that carry NBC also offer free trials, though the cost of forgetting to cancel is steep: Hulu + Live TV charges $90 per month after a three-day trial, while YouTube TV has a 21-day trial followed by a $60-per-month promo rate for two months. Both trial offers are for new subscribers only.

Those options aside, the cheapest way to watch the Super Bowl will be to eat the cost of a Peacock subscription, even if it’s only for a month. Like most streamers, Peacock lets you cancel immediately after signing up and still provides the full month you paid for, with no auto-billing at the end.

Paying $11 for a single sporting event might sting, but at least it gets you the Winter Olympics as well. Lightshed Ventures analyst Rich Greenfield says that combo may explain why NBCUniversal is willing to paywall the big game, even if it means forgoing some ad impressions from free viewers.

“When you have so much firepower, they likely know you’ll convert versus giving so much high-value content away for free as part of a trial,” Greenfield says.

Either way, the trend is likely to continue in the years ahead. Paramount+ stopped offering free trials after a price hike in January, and Fox could eventually try to push its new $20-per-month Fox One subscription service instead of serving the game on Tubi.

It’s a reflection of the overall state of the streaming industry, which initially used low prices and ad-free viewing to lure in new subscribers. For networks like NBC, CBS, and Fox, profits from the cash cow cable business helped fund those endeavors. But as traditional pay TV subscriptions plummeted, and Wall Street began looking for profits from the streaming side, the cost of access has increased.

Free Super Bowl streams are a casualty of that shift. Despite its reputation as a major event for advertisers—with 30-second ads selling for $8 million on average in 2026—the networks are increasingly deciding that they’re better off putting the big game behind paywalls.

Check out Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice.

View the full article