The new season of NASCAR kicked off Sunday with the Daytona 500 race on Fox, which swung into high gear after a temporary weather delay.

Fans who wanted to catch as much of the action as possible didn’t just need an antenna or a pay TV service to pull in their local Fox station or affiliate — they also needed a subscription Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) streaming service Max, which offered access to in-car cameras from all drivers participating in the race.

And thus began a new chapter in what is already a confusing world of sports on traditional and streaming television.

It started first with baseball, when some regular-season games were relegated to Apple TV Plus, Peacock and now Roku. Then, football fans were told they needed Peacock, Prime Video and Netflix to watch as many nationally-televised regular-season and playoff games as possible.

Now, fans of NASCAR are finding themselves needing to juggle multiple services to watch as many races as possible this season — a situation that will only get more-complicated as time goes on.

This year, races will be split across broadcast, pay TV and streaming, with Fox, NBC and the CW Network having NASCAR Cup Series and Xfinity Series races. Other races will air on WBD-owned TNT Sports and stream live on Max, the latter of which will also offer in-car cameras and scanner audio feeds from all drivers participating in all the races this season — even those whose production feeds are airing on a competing network. Prime Video will also have a handful of races this year as part of a pact between Amazon and NASCAR that is intended to lure younger fans to the motorsport.

Long-time fans are finding that having to juggle all those channels and streaming services is a stressful endeavor. A survey of more than 4,500 NASCAR fans conducted by the New York Times’ sports vertical The Athletic revealed frustration by NASCAR fans who simply want a single or a few destinations to watch the races — without having to juggle different services.

Around 35 percent of fans said they were unsure how they felt about needing Prime Video to watch a package of NASCAR races this season, while 16 percent said they had a major problem with the situation, according to The Athletic. One in two fans said Prime Video wasn’t an issue at all, with nearly 84 percent of survey respondents saying they already had a Prime membership, which gives them access to Prime Video and the live sports its carries.

One fan, David Green, said he was more concerned about the business implications for NASCAR by relegating the races across different services, believing that the tactic will limit its reach and potential appeal.

“The number of channels and streaming partners concerns me, not because I won’t be able to find where to go, but because this sport is infinitely better when it is healthy,” Green said, according to The Athletic. “And it is the most healthy when it has the most eyeballs on it.”

That sentiment was echoed by another fan, Kamran Ivari, who questioned how NASCAR can “continue to grow the sport if they keep making it hard to for people to actually watch the races on TV?”

Advocates for the broadcast TV industry have long touted local stations and over-the-air network as the best way to reach as many fans as possible — and, even in the era of streaming, data from Nielsen seems to support that idea. During the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, all athletic competitions were streamed live on Comcast-owned Peacock — but, Nielsen data showed the overwhelming majority of prime-time Olympic viewership still occurred on traditional linear TV, including broadcast.

The same scenario repeated itself earlier this month, when Fox offered a network feed of Super Bowl LIX through its streaming service Tubi. The decision helped bolster the overall viewership of the NFL championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, with Tubi attracting nearly 14 million viewers, according to first-person data reported by Fox. But the majority of people still watched the Super Bowl on traditional linear TV, including their local Fox station or affiliate via over-the-air, cable, satellite and streaming cable-like alternatives, and on Fox Deportes and Telemundo.

By comparison, streaming platforms tend to pull in lower numbers relative to traditional TV. Amazon’s audience for a package of NFL games streamed on Thursday nights has grown each year since it started offering the games on an exclusive basis — it used to share TV rights with Fox and NFL Network — but its audience still pales in comparison with regular-season games aired on ESPN, Fox and NBC. Around 13 million people tuned in to watch Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football in 2024; ESPN saw an average of 15 million people tune in to Monday Night Football on that network, with some games simulcast on ABC, while Fox’s average audience during the season was slightly more than 18 million viewers. NBC’s Sunday Night Football had around 22 million viewers.