How to Watch YES (Including Yankees Games) Without Cable

Cutting the cord is the easy part – and when your cable bill stops coming every month, you can start saving big bucks. You won't miss most of the 700 channels you used to get (how often did you really tune into that easy listening music station, anyway?). But the hard part of cord cutting is giving up the few channels that you actually did enjoy. Or, rather, that would be the hard part — if you actually had to give those channels up. The truth is, most of your favorite channels are available through other means besides the cable and satellite giants. This is true of the YES network, the home of the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Nets, among other teams. Thanks to the proliferation of a new type of streaming service, it's easier (and more legal) than ever to grab a YES livestream and say goodbye to cable or satellite. Here's how to watch YES without cable.

Here is our favorite way to stream YES Network:

	Price	Channels	Free Trial
#1	$69.99 – $139.99	65+	None	See Offer

Baseball fans know all too well that streaming MLB games can be tough. Most regular-season baseball games are aired on regional sports networks (or RSNs), which are tougher to find on live TV streaming services than national networks, like ESPN or FS1, are.

Plus, Major League Baseball has a real issue with blackouts. Obnoxious rights deals keep locally (and nationally) televised games from airing on MLB.TV, meaning that New York-area subscribers can use MLB.TV to watch every regular-season game except the ones that the Mets and Yankees play in. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Even the players seem to hate it.

But don’t despair: You do have options for watching Yankees games and other YES programming without cable. Here’s how.

Unlike cable, DIRECTV Stream streams online and won’t lock you into a long-term contract. YES is one of the networks in DIRECTV Stream's channel selection, which is pretty impressive since most live TV streaming services don’t offer it.

MLB.TV

MLB.TV won’t give you a 24/7 livestream, but it will give you one when it’s most important: when the Yankees are on! MLB.TV streams every regular-season game across all of MLB.

There’s a catch, though: MLB.TV has blackouts. You won’t be able to watch any nationally televised games (including all the playoff and World Series games), and you also won’t be able to watch any games played by teams in your local market. In other words, if a game is on TV in your area — whether that means it's on ESPN or on a local RSN like YES — then it will be blacked out on MLB.TV. This makes it a great way to stream the Yankees if you live outside of the New York area, but it also makes it much less useful for local fans.

There is one way to evade MLB.TV’s blackouts, though, and we’ll talk about it in a later section.

Streaming Yankees games online is great, and it doesn’t mean that you have to watch on your computer. You can use live TV streaming services and MLB.TV with many of the streaming platforms and devices that we recommend to cord-cutters.

MLB.TV offers great platform support, too — you can use it on any of the services in the table above.

Blackouts are the toughest thing about streaming the Yankees (or any MLB team these days, thanks to MLB’s obnoxious rules and regulations). But if you’re willing to bend the rules a bit, you do have options for streaming the Yankees wherever you are.

The key is a VPN, which will enable you to change your IP address and virtually shift your location. A good VPN will run on your PC, Mac, iPhone, Android phone, or even — in some cases — Android-based streaming platforms like Android TV and Amazon’s Fire TV. With a VPN tuned to an out-of-market IP address, you’ll have access to Yankees games that are blacked out in the New York market. Just be aware that this isn’t technically something MLB.TV allows. Luckily, the service hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for cracking down on VPN use in the past.