ESPN’s new ‘Where to Watch’ service is a TV Guide for sports streaming

ESPN’s newest feature will be a welcome bookmark for sports fans everywhere: the company just launched “Where to Watch,” which aims to be a universal guide for streaming sports all over the internet.

When you open the page on ESPN’s website or in its app, Where to Watch looks like a typical schedule of games, the kind of thing ESPN has had forever — it’s sortable by sport and able to show your favorite team at the top. But next to each listing, it now shows where you can watch the game, even when it’s not on ESPN.

ESPN says Where to Watch has data from more than 250 streaming services. On Wednesday morning, it offered me a baseball game on MLB.TV, a college soccer game on ACC Extra, some MLS on Apple TV Plus, and five different ways to stream a WNBA game. ESPN says that you’ll be able to click some listings to go directly to a game, though that’ll require a separate partnership with those services. You can also set the feature to only show games on services you subscribe to.

Where to Watch is a useful solution to an increasingly common problem: sports streaming is a confusing, convoluted, expensive mess, to the point where even liking a single team can mean managing a laundry list of services. Venu Sports, the collaboration between several large entertainment companies, exists — and is hotly controversial — for exactly the same reason.

For ESPN, Where to Watch is just another way to get you into its universe. The company has a lot of sports rights, of course, and displays those all over the new guide, but it’s also looking for ways to get more people on its website and app, where they might also decide to play fantasy sports or gamble through ESPN Bet. As the company also pursues its own streaming goals, it’ll need more ways to show people what’s playing and where. Turning ESPN into the app people open whenever they want to watch a game, no matter where that game is, would be a big win for the company.

And the more the ESPN app becomes a destination, the more leverage ESPN has with partners who might want to show their games there. As broadcast and regional sports networks continue to disappear, Jimmy Pitaro, ESPN’s chairman, told Deadline that ESPN intends to take over. “We’ve made that point to various leagues and commissioners that we are very interested in stepping up,” he said. “We can make these games available in the ESPN app.”

Where to Watch doesn’t have all sports and all streamers, but ESPN says it’s working on adding more over time.