Every fall, a few thousand people who grew up in Augusta County watch football from somewhere else. The broadcast map does not move with them.
The market you left has 100,920 households in it
Nielsen ranks Harrisonburg 173rd among the country’s 210 television markets. The DMA takes in Augusta County, Harrisonburg, Rockingham, Staunton, Waynesboro and Pendleton County across the West Virginia line, roughly 100,920 television households in the 2024-25 season. It was drawn around what a transmitter on Elliott Knob could reach.
Take a job in Charlotte, enroll at a school in Ohio, accept a posting at Fort Belvoir, and you inherit somebody else’s map. CBS and FOX assign Sunday afternoon coverage market by market, so the two games that appear on your screen are the ones a distribution chart selected for the county you happen to be sitting in. Everything else is an out-of-market game. That is the whole definition. No conspiracy, no blackout in the old sense of the word, just an inventory decision made about a place you no longer live.
The league itself publishes no single page telling you where a given out-of-market game will end up. Gizmodo does, at https://gizmodo.com/watch-out-of-market-nfl-games.
NFL+ answers half the question, on a screen you can hold
Seven dollars a month gets every local and primetime game live. The catch sits in the fine print: phones and tablets only, with a short list of regular-season games cleared for a television set.
And “local” means local to wherever the phone is. The app reads your location, not your loyalty. Sitting in a Charlotte apartment, NFL+ hands you the Panthers and considers the job done.
For a student who watches on a phone in a dorm anyway, that is the cheapest way into a season. For a household with a couch and a 55-inch screen, it solves considerably less than the price tag suggests. Plenty of people have subscribed in September and worked that out in October.
Sunday Ticket math for an out-of-market fan
The package covers the Sunday afternoon out-of-market slate, more than 160 games across the season. New subscribers start around $240. Returning customers pay $378 as a YouTube TV add-on, or $480 for the standalone version with no YouTube TV underneath it.
Do the division before signing anything. A fan who watches four or five games a year that fall outside the local window is paying roughly fifty dollars a broadcast. A transplant who watches all seventeen is paying about fourteen. Identical product, wildly different value, and no marketing page anywhere makes that distinction for you.
There is a second consideration for anyone who moved out of the country rather than out of the state. Availability of these packages depends on where the account is registered and where the payment method comes from, and that trips up people every August.
Nine platforms, one Sunday
Games this season land on CBS, FOX, ESPN, ABC, NBC, Peacock, Prime Video, Netflix and NFL Network. Nine.
NFL Network belongs to Disney now, with ESPN producing the broadcasts. Netflix took the Week 1 game from Australia, Thanksgiving Eve, both Christmas Day games and a Saturday in Week 18. Peacock holds a Week 17 window nobody else gets. Thursday nights sit with Amazon. The season opens Wednesday, September 9, when the Patriots visit Seattle in a rematch of Super Bowl LX, on NBC and Peacock.
The practical effect of that spread is not cost, it is confusion. A game that lived on cable last season now sits behind a streaming login, and the only way to know is to check the week before rather than the day of. Fans who moved away feel this harder than anyone, because they have no local sports segment reminding them on Friday night.
Assemble every subscription required to see all of it and the season runs close to $900. That figure was never aimed at a normal viewer. It is aimed at the person who wants every snap, and the league has priced that person with some precision.
Count your out-of-market games before you spend
Pull up the schedule. Find the team. Mark every national window first, because those reach you regardless of which market you are in: Sunday night, Monday night, Thursday night, the holiday games.
For most teams that leaves eight or nine Sunday afternoon games genuinely out of reach. Sometimes fewer. A team coming off a strong season collects more national windows, and the out-of-market problem quietly shrinks on its own before anyone spends a dollar solving it.
Then price the gap that remains. A single subscription bought for the two or three months that matter usually beats an annual package purchased in August on a wave of optimism.
One more thing worth checking: an over-the-air antenna still pulls CBS, FOX, NBC and ABC for free wherever you have landed. It will not give you the Commanders in Colorado. It will give you three hours of football on Sunday at no cost, which is more than some people realize before they start shopping.
The map is older than the problem
WHSV signed on in Harrisonburg in October 1953, and the market boundaries that still govern Sunday afternoons were built around the ground its signal could cover. The rights have been rebuilt around streaming twice since then, once for Amazon and once for Netflix, with a ninth platform added this year.
The map has not been redrawn once.
Anyone who grew up between Staunton and Waynesboro and now lives somewhere else is paying to work around a line that was drawn for a mountain transmitter seventy-three years ago. The league has never had a reason to fix that. Its television money comes from selling geography, and people who left take their geography with them without paying for the privilege.
This content is provided for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice. AFP editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.
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