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.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.