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Super Bowl Sunday is a day to gather around the TV with friends, food, and booze, and enjoy the spectacle. But this year, maybe you sit everyone in a slightly tighter circle as you all watch the big game online.

According to TechCrunch, NBCUniversal is allowing anyone and everyone to stream the Super Bowl and its pre-game festivities (a total of 11, totally necessary hours) for free with NBC Sports Live Extra, just like FOX did with its FOX Sports Go app last year. You can even stick around after the game to watch “The Blacklist” for some reason. But only Verizon has smart phone streaming rights, so you can’t pack all of your friends around your iPhone 6 plus.

People watching won’t have to authenticate with a subscription or login (like you do usually on NBC Sports Live Extra). And to really make cord-cutters pat themselves on the back when they give their spiel about why it’s better, NBC Sports Live Extra will carry the halftime show for the first time and the stream will “include advertisements sold exclusively for digital viewers.” [Looking at you, Squarespace.] Sweet.

More:

According to NBC execs, the plan is to use the Super Bowl event and all the eyeballs it brings to promote the industry-wide effort called “TV Everywhere,” and NBC’s own TV Everywhere offerings. NBC last month had announced its plans to further develop and expand its TV Everywhere-powered streams in 2015, which began with 24/7 live streaming of content from NBC-owned stations.

It’s a huge step towards acknowledging the cord-cutting market on one of TV’s biggest nights of the year… while at the same time promoting a service that does require cable subscriber login credentials. Anyway, I’m sure Kyle is already working on his The Super Bowl is Better on a Laptop post.

[Editor’s note: F off. It’s not better on a laptop, because no one watches anything on laptops anymore. But it might be better on a tablet. And that begs the question– why “laptop” in the headline? You do realize that NBC Sports Live Extra is also a hugely popular app and that just because you can’t watch the Super Bowl on a phone due to the NFL’s draconian agreement with Verizon doesn’t mean you can’t watch it on an iPad, right? Get your shit together. You just alienated 60% of our potential streaming audience with an overly narrow headline.]