ESPN Releases Tool To Help You Find Where To Watch The Game. Thanks, Fractured Streaming!

The fractured entertainment streaming environment we’re currently in continues to be a problem. Where’s that thing you want to watch? Well, not only could it be in one of a dozen places today, depending on what agreements have been worked out with content owners, but where that content can be streamed might also change in the future. So where you watched those old Battlestar Galactica episodes today might not have the content half way through you watching them. And despite some success in recent experiments run, this is also a huge problem when it comes to watching live sports.

With sports, the public not only has to contend with a convoluted and fractured streaming environment, but also with one-off games being streamed on platforms they otherwise don’t appear on as well as the additional factor of deals that teams and leagues have with regional sports networks. As an example, take the Chicago Cubs. Most of their games appear on the team’s dedicated RSN, the Marquee Network. But some of their games are also part of national broadcasts on ESPN or Fox. And a couple stream exclusively on Apple. Where will you find the game on any particular day? Get your pipe and funny hat out, because you have to cosplay as Sherlock Holmes to get your answer.

Now, we could all recognize this problem and come up with a better way to provide live sports streaming so that there is no confusion. But since we’re apparently not going to do that, ESPN has instead developed an app to treat the symptom rather than the underlying disease.

Launching today on ESPN.com and the various ESPN mobile and streaming device apps, the new guide offers various views, including one that lists all the sporting events in a single day and a search function, among other things. You can also flag favorite sports or teams to customize those views.

“At the core of Where to Watch is an event database created and managed by the ESPN Stats and Information Group (SIG), which aggregates ESPN and partner data feeds along with originally sourced information and programming details from more than 250 media sources, including television networks and streaming platforms,” ESPN’s press release says.

Now, as Ars Technica points out, none of this means you’ll actually be able to stream these games. You might not have the service on which it is being streamed. Or you might fall victim to the always-idiotic local blackout rules. In fact, the most useful part of this app might actually be in educating the public on how insane and complicated this all is. Perhaps that will result in a public conversation about why all of this fracturization exists in the first place.

But at least this guide will help people find where their games are being streamed. And, it seems, this is part of a broader effort by ESPN to get more rights to more games to eventually turn the Where to Watch app into a central location for most people to stream most sports content.

ESPN execs have said they hope to start offering more games streaming directly in the app, and if that app becomes the go-to spot thanks to this new guide, it might give the company more leverage with leagues to make that happen.

That could certainly be more convenient for viewers, though there are, of course, downsides to one company having too much influence and leverage in a sport.

See, this is why we cannot have nice things. The public cut the cord, preferring streaming largely over traditional cable television. So then the streaming platforms turned streaming into the same cable-style nightmare that caused the cord-cutting in the first place.