Watch Puppy Bowl & Kitten Bowl 2017 Live Online: Start Time, Streaming Video
Fans who want to watch the Puppy Bowl and Kitty Bowl 2017 live online will be in luck, with streaming video available for both of Sunday’s other big games.
For more than a decade, the Puppy Bowl has given animal lovers a chance to find some non-football enjoyment on Super Bowl Sunday, an adorable display of puppies wrestling and hopping around an arena filled with toys. The Kitten Bowl has emerged as an alternative for cat-lovers instead.
This year’s Puppy Bowl will air at 3 p.m. ET on Animal Planet, while the Kitten Bowl starts a little bit earlier, with the event kicking off at 12 p.m. ET.
Those who are unable to watch the 2017 Puppy Bowl live online will get plenty of chances to catch up. The event will replay back-to-back after the initial 3 p.m. showing, running for the rest of the night. So if the Super Bowl turns out to be a dud, there will be plenty of animal cuteness to keep viewers occupied through the night.
The original Puppy Bowl was just a long block of video showing puppies frolicking in a football-shaped playpen, but it’s grown much more sophisticated since then. Today it has sponsorships, commentators, and even halftime entertainment.
As Vox noted, this year’s Puppy Bowl will have plenty of additional programming to go with it.
“Factor in supplementary Puppy Bowl programming like a pregame show, a ‘where are they now’ special featuring players from Puppy Bowls past, and a Puppy Bowl–themed episode of Animal Planet’s brilliantly mindless series Too Cute!, and the Puppy Bowl accounts for almost an entire day of the network’s programming,” the report noted.
Viewers who watch the Puppy Bowl and Kitten Bowl live online will see what started as a bold experiment. As the New York Times reported, executives at Animal Planet initially envisioned the Puppy Bowl to be simply an alternative for people who were overloaded with football.
“In response to the ratings behemoth that is the Super Bowl, executives at this cable channel created a show that they thought would be Animal Planet’s version of the televised Yule log but turned out to be a hit in its own right. Puppy Bowl IV, a three-hour extravaganza in which a cast of 46 dogs frolics, chases, pants, sniffs, rolls, tail wags and occasionally picks up a ball (or, more likely, a chew toy) on a set resembling a football field, will be broadcast at 3 p.m. on Sunday, with repeats to follow.”
The Puppy Bowl has grown enormously since then, and last year was the third-most watched show on Super Bowl Sunday, The Ringer noted. That means it even outdrew ESPN’s post-Super Bowl edition of NFL Live.
The Kitten Bowl is a bit newer of a concept, but has some big drawing points of its own. The kitty competition will have some big-name announcers — New York Yankees announcer John Sterling and NBC Sports’ Mary Carillo are commentating from the sidelines, while author and animal activist Beth Stern is hosting.
Like the Puppy Bowl, which uses animal shelter pups and promotes adoption, the Kitten Bowl 2017 is all about finding a good home for some needy kitties.
Root on your favorite players at our #KittenBowl party presented by the @hallmarkchannel and @AnimalLeague https://t.co/2kEIKVDWk0 ??? pic.twitter.com/zo5DRUPdyt
— Peggy Adams ARL (@PeggyAdamsARL) January 26, 2017
“Every single cat and kitten and puppy—we have a puppy marching band this year—every single one of the almost 100 animals [this year] have since been adopted,” Stern told Parade.
Viewers who want to watch the 2017 Puppy Bowl live online can find streaming video at Animal Planet Go. Those who want to watch the 2017 Kitten Bowl can click here for streaming video from the Hallmark Channel.
[Featured Image by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images]
