But it was a heck of a lot worse when you just straight up had no way to watch games you wanted to see pre-streaming. Here, we are on the cheapest service out there and guaranteed to be able to see the games we want to watch. Give me a streaming option over hoping to goodness we get a nationally televised game every single time.
Well let's be fair and compare apples to apples. Bar the BTN+ scam (which will absolutely continue) every Illini game is currently available on basic(ish) cable.
Now they won't be. In order to continue squeezing growth from our TV partners, we need to indulge them putting our content behind a paywall where way fewer people will see it.
1. That stinks! It's not nuclear war, but it's worth complaining about.
2. The audience for those games is going to be WAAAAAAAAAY smaller, even compared to "lesser" games on BTN. BTN has 60 million subscribers, Peacock has 27 million, and only 13 million who aren't getting it (temporarily) for free as part of their cable package.
The Peacock games will be watched only by a small number of hardcore fans, who are paying extra for the privilege. That's the new world of sports that the whole industry is nervously tiptoeing towards. It keeps the wolf from the door today, but the numbers do not pencil out for that in the long term.