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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 youll 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. Its 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 advertiserswith 30-second ads selling for $8 million on average in 2026the networks are increasingly deciding that they’re better off putting the big game behind paywalls. Check out Jareds Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice.
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For totally logical reasons, this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy is bucking the trend of a single host city and splitting its sporting events between two main locations, Milan and Cortina. Milan, the second most populous city in Italy, is the urban setting for indoor events like ice hockey and ice skating. Cortina, a ski resort town 250 miles away, provides most of the snowand hill-based venues for quintessential Winter Olympic sports like alpine skiing and the bobsled. But the two separate locations posed a problem for one of the key parts of the Olympics: the opening ceremony. How could there be one grand show when the sporting action was split in half and separated by hundreds of miles? The solution was to put on the show simultaneously in both places. When the opening ceremony is televised around the world on February 6, its pomp, performances, and athlete parades will be broadcast from both Milan and Cortina, with segments from each location woven together into one show. Creative director and executive producer Marco Balich, a veteran of 16 Olympic ceremonies, says the decision to include both locations became a kind of guiding concept for the ceremony itself. Marco Balich (left) with Claudio Coviello and Antonella Albano (right) – Principal Dancers of Teatro la Scala [Photo: International Olympic Committee] Cortina, he says, is “pure mountains,” while Milan is the opposite, “a total industrial, design- and fashion-driven city.” “The narrative that we figured was going to be interesting was the relationship between a location in a city and a mountain, creating a metaphor between man and nature,” he says. [Image: International Olympic Committee] The dichotomy led to the theme of the show, Armonia, or Harmony. “The message that we humbly propose to the world would be to take the metaphor of man and nature and underline that we need to create dialogue between those two elements,” Balich says. Balich and his firm Balich Wonder Studio used this concept to guide the design of everything from the rainbow of costumes dancers will wear to the spiraling stage for the Milan segment of the ceremony. Caterina Botticelli, Costumes Manager [Photo: International Olympic Committee] Balich, who is Italian, also worked on the last Olympics held in Italy, the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, and he says that opening ceremony played heavily on Italian history. This year’s version is much more driven by the impact of Italy on the world, and will include references to Italian inventors, Italian design, and Italian fashion. A special segment of the show will honor the late fashion designer Giorgio Armani. Elements of the ceremony will also feature the mountain areas Valtellina and Val di Fiemme, where other outdoor events will take place. All athletes competing in this year’s Olympics will be able to participate in the ceremony. [Photo: International Olympic Committee] Despite the technical challenges of filming the 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in multiple locations, Balich says the overall production is intended to be very analog and very human. “The images that I remember of the Olympics are always human driven, whether it was Muhammad Ali lighting the cauldron in Atlanta or the drumming in Beijing 2008,” he says.
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Forget Donald Trump. A new analysis suggests the U.S. publics sharp lurch into polarization began in 2008, years before his first presidential campaign. Researchers at the University of Cambridges Political Psychology Lab tracked shifts in Americans views across nearly four decades and found that divisions were broadly stable through the 1990s and early 2000s, before rising steadily from 2008 onward. Using more than 35,000 responses from the American National Election Studies between 1988 and 2024, they estimate that issue polarization has increased 64% since the late 1980s, with almost all of that change occurring after 2008. The research uses a machine-learning approach to move beyond party labels and better understand what actually drives Americans political views. Instead of relying on whether respondents identify as Republican or Democrat, the team grouped people based on patterns in what they believe across a range of issues, from abortion and traditional family values to race, inequality, and health insurance. That distinction matters because in many countries politically opposite parties do not exist, says David Young, a psychology researcher at the University of Cambridge, U.K., and one of the studys authors. You might even want to study countries where there are no parties, like Saudi Arabia, he says. The paper challenges the idea that polarization is solely a Trump-era phenomenon. It points to 2008 as the major turning point, a year that also included the financial crisis, Barack Obamas election, and the widespread adoption of the iPhone-era internet. Our ability to nail down when it starts is slightly divided by the fact that we only have data points every four years, Young says. Still, we know that this increase starts from our 2008 data point, he adds. Thats our best guess at the starting point. The researchers argue that the widening gap is driven less by the right drifting further right and more by the left moving rapidly in a progressive direction. Based on the issues surveyed, the left cluster became 31.5% more socially liberal by 2024 compared with 1988, while the right cluster shifted only 2.8% more conservative. Its not necessarily that left-wingers and right-wingers have become more extreme, Young says. Its more that theyve become more kind of consolidated.
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