The story behind HuddleMaxx
Ryan Kellermeyer is a longtime Philadelphia Eagles fan from Marion, Indiana. For years, if he and his wife couldn't catch an Eagles game on TV, they'd head to a local wings spot to watch. But having kids changes things.
With an active toddler and a baby on the way, Ryan bought Sunday Ticket for the 2025 season. To his dismay, he spent the first quarter of too many games just trying to find a way to watch: out-of-market games he thought were covered had been moved to national broadcast and blacked out from Sunday Ticket.
That experience — combined with a lackluster Eagles 2025 offense — was so frustrating that Ryan wanted to stop watching football altogether. Instead, he used his evenings holding his newborn to explore better options.
HuddleMaxx was built with a baby in one hand and a cell phone in the other, to solve a pain point that out-of-market fans like Ryan face every single season.
How we calculate savings
HuddleMaxx solves a math problem first, then a UX problem on top. For your team's full season schedule, we figure out the cheapest legal combination of streaming services that covers every game you want to watch — given your ZIP, your existing subscriptions, your viewing preference, and any free trials you haven't used yet. The plan that comes back tells you exactly which services to subscribe to, when to subscribe, when to cancel, and which trials to deploy in which months.
The set-cover formulation
Each game has a set of services that legitimately carry it (CBS → Paramount+, Fubo, Hulu+Live, etc.). We model your season as a weighted set multi-cover: pick the smallest total-cost combination of services that covers every game. For multi-team plans the demand quota per team must each be satisfied independently — covering an Eagles game with YouTube TV doesn't free you from also needing coverage for a Phillies game on FOX Sports Philadelphia.
The exact dynamic-programming recurrence (Shahbazi, Esmailpour, Sintos — arxiv 2603.12528):
DP[i][q1]...[ql] = Math.min(
DP[i - 1][q1]...[ql],
w[i] + DP[i - 1]
[Math.max(0, q1 - (services[i].covers(team1) ? 1 : 0))]
...
[Math.max(0, ql - (services[i].covers(teamL) ? 1 : 0))]
)
At service i, choose either to skip it (cost stays
the same as DP without it) or take it (add weight w[i]
and reduce each team's remaining demand quota by 1 if this
service covers a game for that team). Bitmask collapses
equivalence classes so the universe size stays bounded for
exact DP; greedy ln(n)-approximation falls back when the
universe gets too large.
The optimal weight is then extracted as:
Optimal weight = min over all (j₁ ≥ Q_{g₁}, ..., jℓ ≥ Q_{gℓ})
of DP[n][j₁]...[jℓ]i.e., the minimum cost across all DP states where every team's quota is met — the cheapest combination of services that actually covers every required game.
What we layer on top of the cover
- Per-game eligibility. ZIP code drives in-market vs out-of-market routing. MLB.tv and NBA League Pass are blacked out for in-market games; cable bundles only carry your local RSN. We split the cover universe by what each service can actually carry for your specific game, not just the network listing.
- Trial chain. Free trials are one-shot per account, so we pick a placement window that maximizes the games covered. NFL+ is excluded for TV-only profiles (mobile-only); WNBA League Pass is excluded for in-market live-preference users (next-day blackout).
- Subscribe / cancel windows. Monthly services bill in 30-day cycles. We anchor each service window to the first and last game it's needed for, then collapse adjacent months into a single segment so you're not paying for empty calendar months.
- Day-pass swaps. Sling Orange's day-pass tiers ($4.99/$9.99/$14.99) replace a full ESPN Unlimited month when the month has only ESPN/ESPN2/TNT games (no ABC simulcast dependency).
- Bundle implications. Owning DirecTV Stream, YouTube TV, Hulu+Live, or Fubo flags you as already having local RSN access for in-market games — no phantom RSN sub on top.
What we won't do
No facilitating credential sharing. No piracy workarounds. Every recommendation is a service the user subscribes to under their own account using their own payment method. We're not affiliated with any sports league, team, or streaming service — this is a planning tool, not a content distributor.
Data freshness
Pricing, trial terms, and channel carriage are verified against primary sources before each season launch. Schedule data comes from publicly available APIs and is subject to flex scheduling and broadcast reassignments. We re-verify after any reported catalog drift and update the catalog in version control with a verification date.