Sports fans in Minnesota are increasingly running into the same problem every season: finding the game is getting harder, not easier.
That uncertainty has landed squarely on the people running sports bars, who now have to juggle a growing stack of streaming services just to keep customers happy on any given night. In the past year alone, the Minnesota Wild, Twins and Timberwolves have each launched their own standalone streaming services, adding another layer to an already messy viewing landscape.
For anyone trying to follow the Twins, Wild, Vikings, Timberwolves, Lynx, Frost and United, the math gets ugly fast. Catching all of the action can mean subscribing to nearly half a dozen different platforms.
“It’s easier to choose à la carte, but it’s something that kind of changes every year almost,” Molly Herrmann, director of operations at Graze Food Hall in Minneapolis’ North Loop neighborhood, told FOX 9.
Jay Ettinger, co-owner of the nearby Rabbit Hole, said the confusion keeps shifting.
“I was talking with one of my competitors the other day, and we used to call our neighbors down the street if we ran out of ice or $5 bills. Now we call each other to find out what channel games are on,” Ettinger said.
For bar owners, the financial side is just as tangled. The more TVs you have and the more customers you’re trying to satisfy, the more the monthly bill swells. A single fan may spend $50-100 a month on subscriptions, but for a business, that number can balloon into the thousands.
Ettinger said he spends “easily a couple of hundreds [of dollars] a month” to show the games people want.
“And with the football package that we have through DIRECTV, which was kind of a last-minute deal itself until a few weeks before the season … it’s tens of thousands of dollars a year,” he says.
Jim Fehrenkamp, co-owner of Mac’s Industrial Sports Bar in northeast Minneapolis, said the costs have become overwhelming.
“It makes it insanely expensive to navigate, and it switches all the time,” he said. Fehrenkamp estimates the bar spends more than $3,000 a month across streaming platforms.
“We used to just get the NFL Ticket, and that solved the NFL season for us. But now it’s Netflix on Thursdays or [Amazon] Prime on Thursday.
It’s constant, and even colleges are now getting their own streaming services,” he says. “I have 16 TVs, and DIRECTV charges you per box.
You got to make your regular customers happy, but if you have three people coming in and getting a couple of orders of wings and three or four beers each - is that enough to warrant spending that much money?”
Even after paying, owners say the headache doesn’t end. The system changes often, and every new streaming arrangement creates another potential problem behind the bar.
“Them waiting to do this stuff [announce streaming partners] at the start of the season, like the Wild and the Wolves this year, it’s like an athlete waiting until right before the start of season to have ACL surgery,” says Fehrenkamp. “People get pissed off at you while they’re sitting there, trying to watch the game with their jersey of their favorite team.”
Ettinger said the juggling act is relentless.
“We’ve got eight DIRECTV boxes. We’ve got about 62 TVs … It’s a lot of communication, a lot of management, a lot of late-night calls because people are requesting things, and they can’t find it,” he says. “Right now, it’s a bit of a challenge.”
Some providers, including Comcast and DIRECTV, have tried to bundle streams and games into one place. But for owners, that solution carries a familiar irony: it looks a lot like the cable package model fans thought they had left behind.
“We have come full circle, because what streaming offered was to pick and choose what you want, but you can’t do that anymore,” says Herrmann. “So now it comes back to a cable package is basically what you’re paying for.”
Fehrenkamp said businesses could use a package built specifically for them.
“‘Here is your one-time fee, it’s going to be crazy expensive anyway, but at least you’re not putzing around and changing inputs’,” he says. “I wish there was an easier way to navigate each season.”
Ettinger said the industry is built around instant access, but the sports side still isn’t keeping up.
“We’re certainly living in an on-demand generation right now in the world, and people are expecting us to get [games] on our 55-, 65-, and 85-inch TVs. We’re doing our best to accommodate everyone, but it would be great if we could find it all on one platform.
That would be the simplest route,” he says. “I don’t see that happening in the near future.
I think down the road it will happen, but I think in the next year or two, we’re going to continue this scramble.”
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