My thoughts on this after a few weeks...
Background: I cut the cord about 2-3 years ago, and can't get reliable antenna reception where I live. I get pissed when the antenna cuts out, so I stopped trying. I pretty much stopped watching NFL games, which stunk (apart from football, though, I can't say that I've missed anything). In the past, I've had cable and DirecTV with the Ticket. I also don't have a home team - I grew up in Alaska, so there was no obvious home team, so I never picked one.
I picked up NFL Now, and have been loving it. You can't compare it to watching a full game - you pretty much have to compare it to watching the Red Zone channel. The way it works is that when you open up the app, it shows you the most recent big play. It automatically starts the next-most-recent clip, and continues until it loops around. If a new clip happens, it inserts that as your next clip, then continues through the list. This is pretty much the ideal way to do it in my opinion, with some caveats below.
It's not as good as the Red Zone in these ways:
- There's no introduction to the clips. It just jumps into the clip immediately with no introduction or setting of game context.
- Due to this, you spend the first five seconds of every clip figuring out which two teams are playing, the quarter, the score, who's in at QB... and depending on when the clip starts, you might not have time to do all of that and also take a good look at the formation pre-snap and find some key players on the field.
- The result of the play is given away in the title: "Green intercepts Rodgers and returns for TD." It takes away any hope of surprise, which disappoints me more than I would have expected. A verbal introduction usually doesn't give everything away before you see the clip.
- There's no filler - you get nothing but big plays. This might be hard to express, but... when watching Red Zone, you're always watching something live. It might not be a spectacular play, but when one does happen elsewhere, they'll jump to it. The excitement per second is lower than in NFL Now since you end up watching a filler 2-yard rush from the 18 on 2nd and 9, which sounds like a disadvantage for Red Zone. However, when watching only big plays, there aren't enough to fill the time, so you see older big plays. Picture getting home from church at 1:45 and turning on Red Zone or NFL Now:On Red Zone, you'll jump into the middle of the early games and see the remaining big plays in order, with some filler. You'll try to keep a game narrative in your mind for all the games at once, seeing another Jake Locker interception every few minutes and seeing the game gets away from him.
- On NFL Now, you'll see the most recent big play, then start seeing older plays... you'll watch the games in reverse, essentially. You'll see the score is 24-7 Colts and watch them score, then you'll see it's 17-7 Colts and watch them score, etc. It's disorienting. With the plays mixed between games, you end up trying to piece together 10 games at once, backwards. Occasionally, you'll get a new play thrown in, so the next time you see that game, it might be Colts up 31-7 and getting scored on, so you have to tack that onto the end of your mental narrative for that game, which you haven't yet seen the early plays from.
That said, I went from almost no NFL to tons of highlights, with nice little game recaps put together just a few minutes after each game ends that shows all the highlights in order. If I did nothing other than watch all those 3-minute game summaries, it would easily be worth $2/month. I just don't really like watching it real-time. I tend to check it when I get home from church, then again at 4:15, then again around 8. I watch probably a total of around 2 hours of NFL on a Sunday on NFL Now, usually seeing every big play 2-3 times.
