In a rematch of last year’s national championship, top seed and defending champs UConn will take on No. 5 San Diego State at TD Garden in Boston. The winner will head to the Elite 8, where they’ll face either Iowa State or Illinois for a repeat trip to the Final Four.
The game is scheduled to commence shortly, at 7:39 p.m. ET. It will be televised on TBS and truTV, but if you don’t have cable, there are plenty of ways you can watch watch March Madness online for free.
Live-tv streaming services give you the same kind of channel packages of cable but with cheaper prices, no required hardware, the ability to watch anywhere and the ability to cancel whenever you want. There are four of these streaming services that include TBS in their channel packages, and two of them come with a free trial.
That leads us to YouTube TV (“Base Plan”) and DirecTV Stream (“Entertainment” channel package) as the best options for watching UConn vs San Diego State for free.
Not only do both of these include TBS, but they also come with TNT, truTV and CBS, meaning you can watch any tournament game you want. They also each give you five days for free, meaning you could use one service to watch all of this weekend’s games, then cancel, then use the other for next week’s Final Four and national championship. That gives you the whole rest of the tournament without ever having to pay anything.
Maybe you’ve used up your free trials for DirecTV Stream and YouTube TV, or maybe you just don’t want a cheaper long-term suggestion. If that’s the case, every truTV, TBS and TNT game will stream live on Max’s B/R Sports add-on.
A subscription to Max costs $10 per month without a free trial, and the B/R Sports add-on is eventually going to be an extra $10 per month, but it’s currently free.
Another fairly cheap long-term option is Sling TV. The “Sling Orange” channel package will get you TNT, TBS, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3 and 30-plus total channels for just $30 for your first month and $40 after that. There’s no free trial, but this is the cheapest way you can watch both the men’s and women’s tournaments.
All of those streaming services will be locked if you try to access them from anywhere outside of the United States, but a virtual private network (VPN) can hide your IP address/location and get you around these geo-locks. That means that even if you’re in Europe or somewhere else in the world, you can still watch DirecTV Stream (or whatever US-only streaming service).
Most VPN’s will work here, but we would recommend NordVPN due to its reliability, speed and amount of features. There’s no free trial, but you can get your money back if you decide you don’t want it anytime during your first month.
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