Sports are conundrum for sure and one of the only valid reasons to watch "live tv". Personally I don't care for sports but my parents do. The landscape there is pretty terrible as well IMHO. Cable or Satellite are probably the best picture while something like YouTubeTV is probably the best experience (but damn that picture is not good, at least to me it looks blocky often and there are a ton of artifacts on the picture). Game blackouts are something that I just don't understand to this day, like I understand them but how are we still living in the dark ages (pun intended)? IPTV is another option but it's temperamental and has similar picture issues to YTTV in my experience.
TV/Movies can be solved with piracy. Sports can't be solved with money or piracy.
Cable and Satellite really don't have better picture than YouTube TV, in my unscientific yet somewhat curious opinion. I compared YouTube TV to DirecTV as well as FIOS. I felt FIOS had the best picture quality out of all the services prior to YouTube TV, but YouTube TV seemed "crisper", even for sports and other high motion content.
Interesting. I've never done a head-to-head so I'm working off memory but I just never felt like there were so many artifacts/blocking on cable/satellite but I'm far from the best person to ask. I still watch old episodes of things that never were released in HD so I'm fine with bad quality for some stuff but when I tried to watch football when I was home for the holidays I kept getting distracted by the image quality. It's more jarring to go from "clear" to "blocky" than to just stay blocky.
TV/Movies can be solved with piracy. Sports can't be solved with money or piracy.