Channel finder

A decade ago, one cable bill carried every sport, every cable network, and a pile of DVR space. The streaming pitch was that “cord cutting” would replace it with something cheaper. It didn’t. The average US household now juggles four or five paid subscriptions, and the math on any given sport or franchise gets worse every year as rights get sliced thinner.

The Premier League is a good example. Most matches stream on Peacock Premium, a handful are on USA Network (live cable only), and a few are on NBC broadcast. Miss any one of those and you’re missing games. The NFL is even worse. Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV, Thursday Night Football on Prime, Monday Night Football on ESPN, local broadcast on CBS or Fox, plus whatever flex schedule shows up on Peacock or Amazon that week.

This tool is meant to end the “how to watch X” Google spiral. Punch in the thing you actually care about, see every service that carries it, compare prices, and build a shortlist that covers your household without paying for three overlapping streamers.

One warning. Streaming rights move. A show on one service this month can migrate to another before the next season drops. Check the provider directly before you subscribe, and treat any promotional pricing like the limited-time rate it almost always is.

You build a list of titles you want to watch. The optimizer loads the list of services that carry each title, then greedily picks the single service that covers the most uncovered titles on your list for the lowest monthly cost. It subtracts those titles from the uncovered set and repeats. When the uncovered set is empty, it reports the chosen services plus a total monthly price.

Two decisions are worth flagging. First, the optimizer uses “coverage per dollar” as its primary metric, with raw coverage count and price as tiebreaks. That makes it prefer one $83/mo live TV bundle that covers five titles over three small on-demand services at $10 each that collectively cover the same five titles. The one-subscription outcome is both cheaper and simpler. Second, it treats titles flagged as “limited access” (for instance, DIRECTV-only commercial rights) as uncovered, because in practice a residential user can’t subscribe to those tiers.

Greedy set-cover is a classic O(n*m) approximation that doesn’t always find the globally optimal bundle. In theory you can construct inputs where a brute-force search beats it by one subscription. In practice, with your watch list capped at 10 titles and a catalog of about 15 services, the greedy answer is almost always the exact optimum, and it runs in microseconds. If you ever hit the edge case where three small services would be cheaper than a big one, the per-service breakdown makes it obvious, and you can remove a title or pick different services manually.

The result is deliberately simple to read. The service name, its base monthly price, a one-line summary of what you get, and the list of your titles it covers. Total cost at the top, swap suggestions implicit in the breakdown. Save your list by copying the URL. It encodes every selected title as a ?want= parameter, so a shared link opens the same watch list on any device.