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Since its 1994 launch, NFL Sunday Ticket has been available exclusively on DirecTV, which meant subscribing to the satellite provider and putting a dish on your roof.
But starting this season, millions of football fans will be treated to a revamped experience when the league’s out-of-market broadcast package debuts on YouTube and YouTube TV. Better yet, Sunday Ticket can be digitally accessed by anyone — with similar pricing — whether you’re a YouTube TV subscriber or not, thanks to a seven-year, $14 billion-plus deal with Google.
In any event, the NFL doesn’t seem to regret leaving DirecTV.
“It was a good way to move something from a platform that was declining to a platform that’s growing,” NFL vice president of business development and strategic investments Brent Lawton told Front Office Sports, pointing out that YouTube TV is the only paid-TV platform currently growing.
By the end of DirecTV’s contract, some within the company felt Sunday Ticket had been devalued as the NFL continued to take more games away from traditional Sunday afternoon broadcast windows, according to a source familiar with the DirecTV-NFL deal.
YouTube’s price tag represented a 33% increase from DirecTV’s $1.5 billion figure, but by comparison, CBS and NBC both recently doubled their NFL payments.
Now, with YouTube at the helm, the focus for the streamer and league shifts to attracting — and keeping — enough users to make the service worth it.
The Bottom Line
Subscribers are the gold standard for every media executive in 2023, including those in charge of Sunday Ticket.
At its height with DirecTV, Sunday Ticket was widely reported to have around 2 million subscribers. But DirecTV as a whole lost 400,000 subscribers in its most recent financial quarter and is down to about 12.3 million.
In the mid-2010s, DirecTV subscribers consistently topped 20 million — but even then, less than 10% of its customers also bought Sunday Ticket, said the source familiar with DirectTV’s NFL contract.
“There are some benchmarks that we want to be able to hit,” YouTube global head of sports partnerships Jon Cruz said to FOS, without getting into specific details.
As of May, YouTube TV has grown to 6.3 million subscribers. And although Sunday Ticket is available a la carte, the goal is to drive more users to YouTube TV. “Investing in and building this partnership is key for YouTube’s broader connected-TV strategy,” Cruz said.
The NFL will most certainly check in along the way. “I’ll be lying if I said it’s not something that we look at and track,” Lawton admitted.
Tech Specs
One of Sunday Ticket’s new features will be shopping integrations — similar to Amazon, who could experiment with integrated shopping in this year’s inaugural Black Friday game.
“As you distribute games on digital, things like that are much easier to do and much more fan-friendly,” said Lawton, who confirmed that the NFL works closely with its partners on things like e-commerce in and around actual game broadcasts.
YouTube’s Multiview function, meanwhile, will expand on DirecTV’s original offering of a split screen showing four games playing at once — though the company told FOS that there is no definitive timeline for making the function fully customizable.
But from a technical standpoint, the most important factor for YouTube’s success will be reliability. Plenty of NFL fans have memories of thunderstorms affecting DirecTV’s signal. In recent years, DirecTV offered some streaming versions but could never master the technology.
Google is a different beast, but YouTube TV hasn’t been immune to streaming issues: Viewers missed the conclusion of TNT’s broadcast of the Miami Heat’s win over the Boston Celtics in Game 1 of the 2023 NBA Eastern Conference Finals. For Super Bowl LVII, the Fox feed on YouTube TV had a delay of 54 seconds.
While the NFL is of course outwardly confident — “It’s YouTube, they’ve done this before” — Lawton admitted the uncertainty around new tech launches. “You never really know until you get through it,” he conceded.
Others around the industry are closely watching, too. “I suspect the first couple of weeks they may have to work out a few kinks,” Jed Corenthal, an executive with real-time streaming company Phenix, told FOS.
Corenthal expects YouTube’s Sunday Ticket streams to have delays of 30-50 seconds from the field of play. That’s in line with testing from Phenix, which has also found satellite and cable feeds to have varying delays between 5-20 seconds.
Corenthal speaks often with sportsbook operators, who are increasingly offering more live bets from drive-to-drive and even play-to-play.
“It’ll be interesting to see how they deal with cutting off certain bets because of the latency,” he said.
While instant live-betting could be a problem for Sunday Ticket viewers, faster options will still remain through local network feeds.
Dishes Are Done
The DirecTV era of Sunday Ticket will likely be remembered with mixed emotions. “It was a really cool innovation,” The Ringer’s Bill Simmons said on his podcast. “It’s just, they didn’t innovate on it, really, for the last 15 years.”
And while the company remains in business with the NFL — DirecTV For Business has a multiyear deals to distribute Sunday Ticket and Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” to commercial establishments like sports bars — it’s also staying on the offensive.
DirecTV, which signed Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce to star in a new commercial, is offering new customers who also buy Sunday Ticket on YouTube a $400 gift card.
On Sunday, the new era begins. YouTube is bullish on being in business with the NFL, and the league is happy to be moving on from DirecTV. But ultimately, the fans will judge whether Sunday Ticket’s transition was worth it.
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