That is indeed the right way to do it, unfortunately Plex doesn’t handle it well. It’ll show all the episodes separately, but each one plays the entire file (fair, it doesn’t know for sure where the breaks are, but could be done better), and watching the whole thing marks only the one you selected as watched, so you have to mark all the other “episodes” as watched manually (this is annoying, if it knows you watched the whole file, it should know that you’ve watched all the episodes it covers).

Usually if an episode is a 2 parter in one file, I’ll just name it for part 1 since you’d watch them together anyway, but for cartoons the two parts are usually entirely unrelated, so it really only works properly if the file’s split. It’d be better if the interface at least showed that a range of episodes are combined so you could, say, start it and know that the episode you want needs to be scrubbed through to find it, and also if it marked them all as played when you watch the whole thing.

The problem is that the sports industry has been propped up for decades with cable, where every subscriber paid fees for sports whether they cared about it or not. If they charged a reasonable price to just the people who care, it’d be a devastating loss. And cable was structured the way it was because that’s what made the most money, and though cable’s slowly being replaced by streaming, don’t be shocked when the streaming landscape starts to take on a similar shape. There’s already lots of bundling going on, remember when streaming meant that you could save a ton of money by just paying for what you wanted? They’re going to do whatever they can to keep the revenue from falling.