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Over the past few years, the NFL, a professional sports behemoth built largely on the backs of broadcasting deals with the major TV networks, has thrown its lot in with Big Tech to grow its game. In 2022, it was Amazon securing the broadcasting rights to Thursday Night Football. Now, in 2023, it’s YouTube TV — and parent company Google — getting in on the pigskin profits. YouTube TV has just landed one of the juiciest plums of all: NFL Sunday Ticket.
From its debut in 1994 until this past year, Sunday Ticket was the domain of satellite cable provider DirecTV. The service was a way for NFL fans to watch every game on the Sunday slate, as opposed to just the two or three offered by the networks in local markets. This was provided said fan had a tidy bit of disposable income, not just for DirecTV’s standard service, but a couple hundred bucks to spare for Sunday Ticket itself.
The selling point for YouTube TV was, at least ostensibly, making Sunday Ticket more accessible. Google’s streaming service is certainly more nimble than DirecTV. For starters, there is less hardware required — no satellite necessary — and YouTube TV can be viewed on either a user’s phone or streamed through a smart TV or video game system.
But all the vaunted flexibility stops there, at least for now. For years, football fans have had a short wish list of features they would like to see from Sunday Ticket — and at the top is the ability for fans to have essentially a football game à la carte purchasing option. Fans want the ability to follow just the games of a single team, or to pay to watch individual games rather than a full slate. That these lower price points would pull in many more consumers didn’t inspire YouTube to meet those demands where DirecTV failed, at least not yet.
Christian Oestlien, YouTube’s vice president of product management, gave a rather noncommittal statement when pressed on single game or team sales. “We’re doing research on that right now to figure out what are the right types of packages that would be interesting to users,” he told the Athletic. “So nothing to announce there. But, you know, we’re hopeful that we can start testing some new packaging concepts later in the season.”
Considering the many frustrations that viewers had last season with the launch of NFL+, the league’s in-house streaming service, just being able to reliably get in-market games would be enough to entice buyers. Though it appears YouTube is fine with leaving that money on the table.
As for the price option, it is a bit curious that the base cost for YouTube TV was hiked 12 percent per month, from $64.99 to $72.99, weeks before this announcement. After all, a company forking over $2 billion to the NFL will typically try to defray those costs somewhat by passing them along to the consumer. When consumers bristled at the price increase, demanding that YouTube be honest and say it’s because of the new NFL deal, YouTube’s various social media accounts kept parroting a line about increased content costs across the board for its services. It’s been a rapid price ascent overall for YouTube TV, which debuted at $34 a month when it launched in 2017. Six years later, it’s more than double that.
YouTube is enticing customers to sign up for Sunday Ticket through June 6 with $100 off on a presale. Should viewers wait until after that, the base price jumps to $349 — more than the $300 that DirecTV was charging in its final year — and $389 for a Red Zone and Sunday Ticket bundle. This is somewhat amusing since YouTube nixed the Red Zone channel that DirecTV had produced with Andrew Siciliano, and plans to broadcast the other RedZone channel that is produced by NFL Network, so in one sense they are charging more for less.
An issue that Google’s TV package will need to iron out in short order is that of lag time. One might assume an advantage of partnering with a tech giant’s platform is breakneck signal speed, except YouTube TV had a notable problem with latency between when something happens live on the field and when it airs. For some, this may seem a minor inconvenience, though with the way many fans experience sports today — needing to keep up with the commentary in their social media feeds and make live wagers on gambling apps — any significant lag time becomes a frustration.
One analyst claimed YouTube TV had fifty-four seconds of lag time during its Super Bowl broadcast, which was roughly twice as bad as it was in general watching games with a dish on DirecTV. Sure, it’s more expensive and its performance leaves something to be desired. But won’t you be happy to know a tech company is monitoring which games you’re eyeing during the late afternoon window?
