Minnesota sports bars scramble to keep up with streaming for fans

MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) - In an era of streaming packages-a-plenty, sports bars throughout Minnesota are left with the task of navigating how to find what’s showing on a nightly basis, leaving fans of all sports to wonder: How will they know if their team's game will be shown?

Minnesota sports streaming issues

What we know:

For a fan of all the major sports teams in Minnesota — namely the Twins, Wild, Vikings, Timberwolves, Lynx, Frost and United — any given person would have to subscribe to nearly half a dozen different platforms in order to catch all the action they wanted.

"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, says it seems like a "new twist is kind of thrown our way" every day when it comes to where to find games. 

"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. 

‘Tens of thousands of dollars a year'

By the numbers:

For bar and restaurant owners, the problem only increases proportionally as TVs line their walls, and patrons fill their stools.

If a single fan racks up $50–100 in monthly subscriptions, it can easily become hundreds or even thousands for larger establishments.

Ettiger said he spends "easily a couple of hundreds [of dollars] a month" to show all the games patrons 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.

"It makes it insanely expensive to navigate, and it switches all the time," said Jim Fehrenkamp, co-owner of Mac's Industrial Sports Bar in northeast Minneapolis. He estimates spending more than $3,000 monthly on all streaming platforms combined. 

"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?"

Dig deeper:

Even when purchased, that doesn't stop the headaches for owners who cite changing platforms and an overarching patchwork system for creating another series of potential problems waiting to happen.

"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."

"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," Ettinger says. "Right now, it's a bit of a challenge."

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Clamoring for cable

Big picture view:

Owners are quick to note that providers such as Comcast and DIRECTV have made efforts to pool streams and games into one resource, even if it comes with a sense of irony — pointing out that they're clamoring again for what cable offered standard in the 1990s and early 2000s.

"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 suggests providers offer special packages for businesses.

"'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."

"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," says Ettinger. "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."