UPDATE: Canada will get KC Chiefs game on TV, but US fans still stuck with Peacock | Opinion

Update: It has now been announced that the Chiefs-Dolphins game Saturday will be on television on the TSN , CTV and RDS networks in Canada, so they’ll be getting the game on cable and broadcast TV, while U.S. fans won’t.

If you think misery loves company, you’ll be pleased to know we aren’t the only ones feeling chafed by the NFL-NBC decision to hand off Saturday’s Chiefs/Dolphins playoff game to the paid Peacock streaming service.

There are also our neighbors up north. And I’m not talking about Nebraska.

After my column earlier this week objecting to the league’s first foray in pay-to-view playoffs, I got an e-mail from Leone Pippard, a reader in Fredericton, a city of 60,000 in the Canadian maritime province of New Brunswick.

She’s a dedicated Chiefs fan and has had quite a go of it trying to watch her beloved team these last two weeks. She chronicled her frustrations in an e-mail to NFL Customer Support, which she shared with me.

She wanted to watch last week’s regular season closing game against the Chargers and saw in the adverts that it was being streamed on Paramount+, CBS’s equivalent of Peacock.

“This would require a subscription to the Paramount+ service, which I really don’t want, but, I was being forced to take it, in order to see the Chiefs. So I signed up for a month,” she wrote.

But then when Sunday rolled around, she couldn’t find the game on the site. After 40 minutes of looking for it and chatting with customer support, she got the bad news: “unfortunately Paramount+ was not set up to livestream NFL games into Canada.”

This week, it’s new game, new platform, same old song.

“Again, thanks to the deal the NFL has struck with NBC’s Peacock streaming service, this weekend’s Chiefs’ game will not be televised on NBC, but only livestreamed on Peacock,” she wrote. “Except, as Peacock states on its Canadian site, it won’t be live-streamed in Canada.”

“So where does this leave your Canadian viewing market as your north-of-the-49th-parallel fan base for NFL games and for following our favourite teams (mine being clearly the Chiefs)?” she asked. “I’ll tell you. Out in the cold.”

Congrats NFL. Canadians are probably the most level-headed people on Earth and even they’re ticked off by your Peacock experiment.

I did a little research and found that in Canada, the Chiefs/Dolphins game is available online with a package called NFL Game Pass, which they can buy through a streaming platform called DAZN.

But I hit a wall when DAZN would only show me prices for its U.S. variant, which doesn’t offer anything NFL and appears to be dominated by mixed-martial arts prizefights and Euro women’s soccer, if that’s what you’re into.

So I prevailed upon my new pen pal in New Brunswick to look into what DAZN offers up there.

She sent me screenshots showing that NFL Game Pass gives Canucks access to every game in the league for $29.99 a month. Being that it’s Canada, there’s a 15% tax on streaming services, so the overall bill is $34.49. I ran the conversion and it’s the equivalent of $26.54 U.S. dollars.

For the season, that’s actually a pretty incredible bargain compared to U.S. prices.

Our problem here south of the 49th Parallel is that the NFL is broken up among so many platforms, you need beaucoup bucks to get them all.

Thursday Night Football’s on Amazon Prime, $15 a month.

Monday Night Football’s on ESPN. But you can’t buy ESPN alone — it’s only available on cable or broad-based streaming services that are like cable. The cheapest I can find is Sling TV’s Orange package, $40 a month.

The NFL’s overseas games are streamed on the NFL Channel. That’s on Sling Blue, which is another $40, but you can circumvent that if you don’t mind going online and switching from Orange to Blue and back over and over.

That combination of streamers (we’re up to $55 a month), plus broadcast TV, will get you the NFL’s national broadcasts and your three regional games a week.

If you want “out of market” games, (say you’re an Arizona Cardinals fan in Kansas) and want to see your team each week, that’s only available on YouTube TV and will set you back $449 a year.

The price tag for the Chief’s Peacock Bowl is $5.99 for a month of that streaming service.

Football fans in the U.S. would be dancing in the streets if we could get the whole NFL for $26 and change a month, like the Canadians can.

But at this point in the season, if my friend Leone were to sign up for DAZN to see the Peacock Bowl, that’s the only game she’d get that won’t be on regular TV. And no matter how much you love the Chiefs, $34.49, even in Canadian money, is pretty steep for one game.

So to Leone, and all the other Canadian citizens of Chiefs Kingdom, we feel your pain.

Why I’m steamed at the Chiefs, the NFL, NBC and Peacock; and you should be too | Opinion