How to Stream Your Team’s Football Games on the NFL+ App - VICE
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We’re not gonna talk about how my Carolina Panthers lost to the Chicago Bears yesterday in its season opener in a blowout, or about how our defense folded more times than a laundromat run by Terminators.
No, today we’re going to talk about why so many people today are Googling that they had trouble figuring out the NFL+ app yesterday when they tried to stream their teams’ season-opening games.
September 13 marked the opening day for the NFL’s regular season, and plenty of people found themselves in a scrimmage with the NFL+ app, which suffered an outage for some users who expected to ring in the 2026-2027 season with watching the coin toss at the start of their teams’ games. Even those unaffected by the outage found themselves wondering how to watch the subscriptions they’d just signed up for. So if you’re a new subscriber to NFL+, here’s what to know ahead of the next game.
Once you’ve signed up for NFL+, you can watch it through your smart TV, tablet, smartphone, or streaming box by downloading the NFL app and logging into your account. Head into the app’s settings menu, and you should see a way to connect your NFL+ subscription so that you can stream games live through the app.
While you can also watch by going to NFL.com and logging in there on an internet browser, I’d only do that if I were on a desktop computer or laptop. On a smartphone it’s a lot more intuitive to just use the NFL app. Toggling to and away from full-screen mode is easier on the app when using a small screen.
You don’t need both NFL+ and NFL Sunday Ticket. NFL+ is a way for you to watch locally and (most) nationally televised games without signing up for a conventional cable or satellite TV subscription, or a live TV streaming subscription like YouTube TV or Hulu TV. You get to watch the games you’d ordinarily see if you signed up for one of those, but without the contract and for the much lower price of $7 per month or, on an annual plan, $50 per year.
NFL Sunday Ticket is for those unlucky sports fans who live outside the market for their team. It shows you (almost all) out-of-market games. So I live in New York and am a die-hard Carolina Panthers fan. I can watch (almost) all the Panthers games, except for when we play a team from the New York metropolitan area, so no Panthers versus Jets or Giants match-ups.
Amazon Prime has the exclusive rights to broadcast all Thursday night NFL games, and so you’ll need a Prime Membership to watch them through the Amazon Video app. Fortunately for you, there aren’t that many Thursday night football games in a season. But neither NFL+ nor NFL Sunday Ticket will bring you those games, so if you want to see them your solution is either to pony up for a Prime subscription, if you don’t already have one, or go out to a sports bar that’s showing the game.
