This Super Bowl weekend, you can focus on making nachos and Buffalo wings and worry less about how to watch the big game. There will be more methods and devices than ever before to watch the Broncos and Panthers without cable — all headache-free, no sketchy workarounds required.

CBS, the television network that is broadcasting this year’s big game, will stream the Super Bowl free through apps on a broader set of devices than in the past. Owners of Roku’s set-top boxes, Apple TV, Google’s Chromecast, Microsoft’s Xbox One and Amazon’s Fire box can download the free CBS Sports or National Football League apps and watch the Super Bowl with no login credentials required, the company said.

“For us, our goal is to expose the game to the largest audience possible for the Super Bowl,” said Jeffrey Gerttula, a senior vice president of CBS Sports Digital, in an interview. That, of course, translates into maximizing the number of eyeballs on the lucrative TV ads that play during Super Bowl, which have sold for a record $5 million for 30 seconds of ad time.

This year’s Super Bowl, the 50th, will be the second that CBS has streamed free, though it will be the first time its streaming apps play the commercials while they are shown on television, Mr. Gerttula added.

That the Super Bowl is so easily streamable should only accelerate the consumer revolt against big cable. The research firm eMarketer estimated that last year about five million American households that once paid for TV no longer do, up about 10.9 percent from the previous year. The firm estimated that by 2018, one in five American households will not subscribe to cable or satellite TV.

That’s no surprise because the availability of digital content keeps expanding for cord cutters. Last year, there was an explosion of options offering the ability to watch programming from HBO, Showtime and Nickelodeon, among others, without a cable subscription. In addition, digital streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have been investing heavily in original content like “Jessica Jones,” “Daredevil” and “The Man in the High Castle.”

When it comes to the Super Bowl, streaming the game is the simplest way to go if you are not going to watch it on cable. (In my recent testing of a group of streaming devices, my favorites were the new Apple TV and Roku.) But there will be some restrictions to streaming the game free. International fans cannot stream the game without a subscription to N.F.L. Game Pass, a $99-a-year video service for watching football games, according to the N.F.L. And if your Internet connection is slow, expect some irate party guests when the video sputters or the picture quality degrades.

Fret not, brave cord-cutter. I tested several other options, including digital antennas and the Slingbox, a device that can connect to a friend or family member’s cable box to watch the game on a streaming device. The antennas were simple to set up and the picture quality was excellent. The Slingbox was a bit rougher to set up and will not be an ideal method for watching the Super Bowl, but is a useful device to keep in your back pocket if you are often abroad and don’t want to miss out on live national sports.

For antennas, I tested the $40 ClearStream Eclipse (the top antenna pick by The Wirecutter, the product recommendations website) and the $100 ClearStream 2V (on sale now for $90), both made by the company Antennas Direct. The Eclipse, designed for indoor use, has a paper-thin antenna with a sticky side to tack it to a wall. The 2V, for indoor and outdoor use, is a bulky antenna that looks like two rings stapled to a cage. Both antennas took a few minutes to set up: You screw the cord into the antenna input on the back of the television, then figure out where to place the antennas for the best signal.

After some experimentation, I found that sticking the antenna to a wall around the corner from my television pulled the clearest signal from CBS. I got about 40 channels, including ABC, various home shopping channels and a station that plays only Korean pop music videos.

Consumers will have to do their homework before buying an antenna by looking up their proximity to nearby transmitters. Antennas Direct says that with an outdoor antenna like the 2V, you’ll probably get poor reception if you’re more than 70 miles from transmitters. For indoors antennas like the Eclipse, 35 miles is outside the comfort zone.

If you are reasonably close to TV transmitters, the benefits of an antenna make the technology a sound investment. It’s cheap, for one, and when you get a clear signal, the high-definition channels can look even better than digital cable because the image you get with an antenna is raw video broadcast over the air, unlike the compressed video sent over digital cable.

“When you’re getting the raw video, it might be double or triple the quality of satellite or cable,” said Richard Schneider, the founder of Antennas Direct, in an interview. “It’s a much more detailed picture than what you’d get through paid TV.”

via http://www.nytimes.com/

This weekend, everyone’s going to be doing exactly one thing. OK, make that two things, because the Puppy Bowl is on. But Super Bowl 50 is coming, and it’s sure to be one of—if not the—most-watched night of television this year. You really want to watch it. But many of you also don’t have cable. Fear not: Here’s a quick and dirty list of things you likely already have that will bring the game to you.