Americans: How to Watch for Free

"How can I watch rugby for free?" seems to be a question on the lips of a lot of budding players in the United States. Not everyone who wants to enjoy and learn about the game is in a position to buy an expensive subscription, so alternatives are handy. In response, here's an attempt at a small list of available viewing options for both rugby union and rugby league for free in the U.S. This list is specific to U.S. viewers, so it won't be too useful for anyone else. Deliberately excluded are dodgy options like file-sharing/stealing sites, etc. If you have others, I hope you'll consider posting to the comments section to help your fellow fans!

Full Matches:
The hands-down best way to watch, especially for the purpose of learning about the game, is to watch the full matches. Highlight segments are scintillating, but they don't tend to show how the highlights occurred, and by definition they tend to be things that a lot of people can't do and often shouldn't try. They're fun, but no substitute for sitting and watching the way a side works through a whole match to win. A few free sources of whole matches are:

Rugby Union:
The USA Rugby Network is a good source for a lot of high-level domestic and international matches (featuring U.S. sides, at least) via occasional live feeds, and it also archives a lot of matches. There are also some older archived matches at the USA Rugby site's video section.

The Glendale Raptors, the U.S. 2008 senior men's Division I national runners-up, have a lot of good archived video. One one page, they provide video from most of the national championship series matches that were hosted at their home ground last weekend. On others, they have a number of their own men's and women's matches from the year. A lot of the same matches are available for free on Glendale Rugby's Mediazone site, though registration with the site may be required to access the stream (alternately, you can download the videos to your computer to watch).

Every now and again, you can turn up a full rugby union match on YouTube or Google Video. For example, today we spotted the 1987 World Cup Grand Final and the 2003 World Cup Grand Final, and some 2008 Rugby Super League (U.S.) matches in four-part series. Of course, some of these videos will come and go on you a little.

Rugby League:
Bigpond provides two options for watching NRL matches: their extensive video library and their round-the clock live stream of "League TV" (one of the "TV Channels" options on BigPond TV). Sometimes the streams are good, and sometimes they are a little unreliable (especially the "League TV" stream). You also have to wait a couple of days after a match to watch the video.

Highlights, Clips, etc.:
Although full matches are the best way to get the whole context of the game, we all enjoy the highlights and lowlights (or they wouldn't be posted here so often). Those are more plentiful for free.

As you can see from the various clips sometimes posted on Armchair Playmaker, YouTube and Google Video are drenched in short clips and highlights of all kinds. The problem there might be how to sort through so many, but you can enjoy a few highlights if you can wade through all the clips of drunks smashing each other and people showcasing their video game skills.

Rugbydump is a massively popular source for great rugby union highlight clips. They update often and have days and days worth of highlights. Armchair Playmaker posts a few highlight clips here and there (including a few from Rugbydump or clips that Rugbydump also ends up posting as well, though we won't pretend to be anything like the clip and highlight source they are.

Although The Rugby Channel's bread and butter is rugby union pay-per-match and subscription viewing (with good rates), they also offer some free clips each week, as well as commentary programs, etc.

In addition to their full match services, BigPond's aforementioned video library and "League TV" stream on BigPond TV feature higlights and related clips. BigPond also features the NRL Deluxe program.

One the Nine MSN site, one can watch clips from The NRL Footy Show.

That's surely just the tip of the iceberg, but it's a start if you can't pony up for pay services from The Rugby Channel or Setanta Sports US.

If you've got some other useful freebie resources, post a comment!