$350 NFL Sunday ticket more expensive than DirecTV

Following Google’s $2 billion a year deal to make NFL Sunday Ticket exclusive to YouTube TV, Google has now announced exactly how much football fans will pay each week for each NFL game that’s not on the market. Short answer: don’t expect any revolutionary pricing packages or offers just because they go online.

The Sunday Ticket used to be a major sports package on DirecTV, giving people access to about 13 NFL games a week. Between your Sunday Ticket subscription and your regular cable TV subscription, you can watch every NFL game every week. The service’s new home, YouTube TV, is no ordinary YouTube; it’s more like cable TV channel packages, but over the internet. Instead of getting the usual bunch of cable TV channels (CNN, ESPN, MTV, etc.) from Comcast, Spectrum, or any other local monopoly, you can get it from YouTube instead over the Internet, usually for the same price. YouTube TV currently costs $72.99 per month, as does a cable TV subscription.

Google has two pricing sets for the Sunday Ticket, one for people currently paying a basic $72.99 per month fee for YouTube TV, and one for those who aren’t a subscriber. For subscribers who are already paying a hefty monthly fee for YouTube TV, the Sunday ticket is $349 per season. This is more than the cost on DirecTV, where the price was $300 per season + the base rate for a monthly DirecTV subscription, which is about $65. If you don’t want to pay for YouTube TV cable channels, you can subscribe to the Sunday Ticket through “YouTube Primetime Channels “, where the cost is $100 more, or a flat fee of $449 for the entire season.

Google’s blog post says, “On YouTube TV, members will have access to features like a brand new multi-view as well as unlimited DVR storage,”so it looks like the “Primetime Channels”standalone package won’t support DVR, while YouTube TV subscribers will, which is the main difference.

And then there’s NFL Red Zone, a compelling seven-hour commercial-free live show that takes place every Sunday and takes you from game to game when the action is happening. As usual, the Red Zone costs in addition to the Sunday ticket. For each RedZone package, $40 more for the entire season. YouTube TV will distribute the NFL Network’s version of RedZone, hosted by Scott Hansen. DirecTV’s in-house production spawned the idea of ​​live TV from the Red Zone Channel, which the NFL copied, so there have been two competing Red Zones for some time now. The DirecTV product is shutting down due to the loss of the Sunday Ticket, which is a good thing since the NFL network version is generally considered the best.

Other content created by DirecTV, such as “Short Cuts”- entire games edited to about an hour to show only plays – and the DirecTV Fantasy Zone will have no equivalent on YouTube. DirecTV Game Mix channels will be showing eight games simultaneously in live score split-screen format, and while this won’t play on YouTube TV either, YouTube has just launched a four-game Multiview feature. Google also says it’s working on “adding shopping integration so viewers can easily buy items to support their teams, and social features that YouTubers are already familiar with, like chat, polls, and more.”

Google offers an early data plan. If you sign up by June 6th, you’ll get $100 off your first season. There are no more student discounts. Google says you’ll be able to sign up for the YouTube TV app, and today that option is available to some people.

There is no 4K add-on because weekly NFL games are produced and broadcast in 720p only! That’s not a typo, and yes, that’s still true in 2023. For really important games like the Super Bowl, NFL partners will choose “good”cameras and film the game in 1080p. It’s not that I’m bitter. You get two simultaneous streams of Sunday tickets on any device. The 4K add-on will usually give you additional simultaneous streams, but this is not the case with the Sunday Ticket.

The Sunday Ticket offers “non-market”regular season NFL games, which means you won’t get Sunday games that air on your local FOX and CBS channels (you should just watch them on your local channels), as well as Primetime games like Sunday Night Football (available on your local NBC station), Monday Night Football (on ESPN), and Friday Night Football (on Amazon Prime Video). Without these games excluded from the package, you typically get about 13 NFL games per week on a Sunday ticket. The Sunday ticket is an option for fantasy football fans or people who support a non-local team.

The Sunday ticket is a bit more expensive than what DirecTV asked for, but the prices here are mostly just maintaining the status quo, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Google’s strategy on YouTube TV is to take the cable television model and reproduce it faithfully on the web, usually without cost savings over traditional cable television. Instead of having a $100 cable TV bill with a bunch of bundled channels you don’t need, you can get a YouTube TV bill that’s $100 with lots of bundled channels you don’t need. Second, NFL contracts with CBS and FOX were reported to prohibit the NFL from cutting the price of a Sunday ticket because it would devalue local games.

The dream is the Sunday Ticket package with à la carte options, where you can subscribe to one team or just the RedZone channel, but none of that happens. This likely conflicts with the terms of contracts the NFL has already signed with other partners.