You don't need a cable bill to keep watching NBC. Here's every way to stream it online, and how to do it for free.
Reviewed and updated June 2026 by our cord-cutting team · 9 options
The cheapest way to watch Nbc is Tablo TV for $0/month.
You can watch NBC without cable for free on Fubo, DIRECTV, Hulu with Live TV, DirecTV MySports Skinny bundle, or YouTube TV. You can also stream it with Sling TV Blue, Peacock, Sling Select, or Tablo TV.
I started A Good Movie to Watch in 2013, and for a long time cord-cutting was something we covered because readers kept asking about it, not because we went looking for it. The prices changed that. We now keep paid accounts on more than a hundred live TV and streaming services in the US, and we hold onto them on purpose, since the only reliable way to know that a service has raised its price or dropped a channel is to be the one getting the bill. The rest of that work is on our cord-cutting hub.
This NBC guide has been up since 2021, and we come back to it whenever something we wrote has stopped being true, which is more often than it should be. No company pays us to move it up the list, and we hold no stake in any of them. The affiliate links on this page are part of how we keep it free to read, but they have no effect on the ranking or on anything we say about a service. When one of them is overpriced or a chore to use, we tell you that, even the ones paying us a commission.
Start with these. Every service below comes with a free trial, so you can watch NBC without paying a cent, at least to start.
Fubo is known by many as a sports-forward live TV streaming service. And while that is true, it also offers a good number of entertainment, lifestyle, and news channels — among them your local NBC. A carriage dispute resulted in Fubo losing Warner Bros. channels like CNN, TNT, and TBS, but if you don’t mind missing them on your lineup, then Fubo is a worthwhile cord-cutting option.
It leans heavily on sports, and a regional sports fee of a few dollars up to about $17 by ZIP gets added on top.
DirecTV Stream is pricey, but it covers all bases when it comes to live TV streaming. It offers NBC and all the other local channels, has unlimited DVR, provides remote and simultaneous viewing, and it’s fairly easy to flip through. Out of all the streaming services, DirecTV Stream is the most similar to traditional cable, except you don’t have to commit to a contract. You can cancel your subscription to DirecTV Stream anytime you want.
The price climbs steeply between tiers, and a regional sports fee gets added on top.
Hulu with Live TV is a streaming package that combines live channels with Disney+, ESPN+, and, of course, Hulu on-demand at no extra cost. It’s the best option if you’re already subscribed to those services, since getting them via bundle usually costs less. Your local NBC comes with the plan, as do other local channels. It also has unlimited DVR. Where it differs from most services is that it only allows two, instead of the usual four, simultaneous streams.
It caps you at two simultaneous streams, the fewest of the big live-TV services; lifting that cap costs about $10 more a month.
The “MySports” package from DirecTV is the cheapest way to combine ESPN, ESPN+, Fox Sports, ABC, TNT, and NBC. It’s the sports bundle that we could have only dreamed of in the past, especially considering that DirecTV is widely considered to have the best picture quality out of every cord-cutting service.
It's a sports-only skinny bundle, so it leaves out most entertainment and news channels.
Thanks to its familiar interface and wide-ranging channels, YouTube TV is one of the more popular cable alternatives right now. It features local channels like NBC, easy-to-use cloud DVR, and premium add-ons in case you want to strengthen your streaming lineup. It’s great for general viewers, though it might not be the best fit for sports fans, since YouTube TV’s picture quality can be inconsistent. It also doesn’t have too many RSNs when compared to Fubo and DirecTV Stream.
At around $83 a month it's one of the priciest options, and add-ons push the bill past $100 fast.
These don't offer a free trial, so you'll pay from day one. They're here for completeness and for the cases where they're cheaper or carry something the trial services don't.
Sling Blue is a live TV plan owned by telecom company Dish. It offers 50 hours of DVR and carries popular channels like CNN, FS1, and AMC. In select markets, it also streams local affiliates of NBC, FOX, and ABC. You have to pay an extra $5/month for local channels, but the final cost still beats the price tags of a lot of the other live TV services in this list.
There's no ESPN on the Blue lineup, and local channels only come in a handful of markets.
Peacock’s Premium Plus plan, which goes for $13.99/month, now comes with your local NBC channel. Along with this, Peacock streams live sports and boasts an on-demand catalog filled with original titles and popular NBC programs. The premium tier supposedly removes ads from on-demand titles, but some subscribers have complained about still getting them. Another point of improvement? For the price, it would be nice to get live feeds of NBC’s sister channels, like USA or Bravo.
Most network shows land next-day on demand rather than as a live feed.
Sling’s new skinny bundle called Select includes 11 TV channels for $19.99, making it the cheapest way to get NFL Network or Fox Sports 1. This is Sling’s answer to DirecTV’s genre packs and other bundles that the cord-cutting industry is starting to offer to grapple with one reality: cord-cutting was becoming a lot like cable. Sling Select is a welcome alternative.
It's a limited add-on tier, so it won't replace a full live-TV lineup on its own.
One way to watch NBC without cable is through an antenna amplifier like Tablo. Tablo receives the freely broadcast signals of local channels like NBC and connects your streaming devices to them. You pay upfront for the equipment and installation, but once that’s done, you get channels appearing on the Tablo TV app at no monthly cost.
The honest way to watch NBC for free is a free trial, and the trick is not to spend them one at a time. Start one, then start the next when it ends, and you can string together a few weeks of free live TV back to back, usually enough to cover a tournament or a playoff run without paying for a month.
If you're cutting cable for NBC, odds are you want Cozi TV too. It's a sister channel, so every service above that carries NBC carries Cozi TV as well, and the same free trials get you both. See our full guide to watching Cozi TV without cable for the per-service breakdown.
| Service | Price | Free trial | Channels covered | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fubo |
$73.99 | 7 days | 47 | Get it |
| DIRECTV |
$89.99 | 5 days | 54 | Get it |
| Hulu with Live TV |
$88.99 | 3 days | 57 | Get it |
| DirecTV MySports Skinny bundle |
$69.99 | 5 days | 16 | Get it |
| YouTube TV |
$82.99 | 7 days | 68 | Get it |
| Sling TV Blue |
$50.99 | None | 35 | Get it |
| Peacockon-demand |
$10.99 | None | 8 | Get it |
| Sling Select |
$19.99 | None | 11 | Get it |
| Tablo TV |
Free | None | 10 | Get it |
Cheapest is the question everyone starts with, and it's the wrong place to stop. A $35 plan that drops NBC the month after you sign up hasn't saved you anything. So the first number we pay attention to is the real one, what you owe after the introductory month ends, not the figure in the ad. From there it comes down to whether the channels you actually want sit in the base plan or get stranded in an add-on, how the service behaves day to day (a slow app and a useless DVR wear on you faster than you'd expect), and how much of a fight it puts up when you decide to leave.
Whatever lands at the top of a list like this is the service that gets most of that right for the most people. Once in a while that's also the cheapest one. Usually it isn't.
Some of the links on this page are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you sign up through one. It never costs you anything extra, and that money is part of how we pay writers and keep the site free to read.
What it doesn't do is buy a place on the list. We order these services by price, by the channels they carry, and by how they hold up in actual use, and a commission has no bearing on any of it. Plenty of the services we link to get called overpriced or a pain to use right here on the page. Prices and lineups also change constantly, so it's worth checking the current numbers on the provider's own site before you sign up for anything.
The people who test, price-check, and update our cord-cutting coverage.
