- Sunday Ticket has been available exclusively on DirecTV since 1994.
- With YouTube at the helm, the focus for the league shifts to attracting and keeping enough users to make the service worth it.
With YouTube at the helm, the focus for the league shifts to attracting and keeping enough users to make the service worth it.
“Since its inception in 1994, NFL Sunday Ticket has been accessible solely through DirecTV, requiring subscribers to sign up with the satellite provider and install a dish on their rooftops. However, this season marks a significant change as millions of football enthusiasts will enjoy an enhanced experience when the NFL’s out-of-market broadcast package debuts on YouTube and YouTube TV. What’s even more exciting is that Sunday Ticket will now be accessible digitally to everyone, with pricing akin to traditional options, regardless of whether you’re a YouTube TV subscriber or not. This transformation is the result of a massive seven-year, $14 billion-plus agreement 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.
