Restaurant & Bar Owners Voice Concerns Over Streaming Games

Bar and restaurant owners are sounding the alarm for their customers and businesses are being forced to pay increasingly higher prices for streaming NFL games.

"It's why we're speaking up, because the simple matter is that it is hard to watch all of the streaming things… Is it on YouTube TV? Is it the [NFL] Sunday Ticket? Is it Amazon?" Texas restaurateur and Tailgators Pub & Grill founder Jim Hallers said on "Varney & Co." Friday.

"For the last 30 years, it's come to us through DirecTV, and it's just worked," he continued. "And so we like a centralized approach, but we just need technology that works, and streaming is still very immature."

Testifying before Congress on Wednesday, Hallers explained to lawmakers that the sports media landscape's sudden fragmentation into separate streaming apps is creating an expensive tech maze for hospitality venues. It is threatening the business model of often-rural neighborhood pubs that rely on NFL fans to keep their doors open in the fall.

"Everybody has to move to streaming. And so, literally, now, we have to buy streaming boxes. And in a typical smaller bar where I have maybe 30 or 40 TVs with a DIRECTV box mounted behind every television, I now have to get an EverPass streaming box. But you can't put an EverPass streaming box behind every TV. It doesn't work like that," Hallers said on Capitol Hill. "Just imagine at home, if you tried to stream, you know, 30 Netflix's at once, your internet's just going to die. Well, it's the same way for most bars and restaurants today."