YouTube officially has the rights to stream NFL Sunday Ticket come the 2023 season, and it’s hinting at some massive shakeups in its distribution. One way you might be able to subscribe to Sunday Ticket is at a cheaper rate than the normal plan, which would give you less games and bonus content. That’s at least a possibility floating around in the head of Brian Rolapp, chief media and business officer at the NFL.
“We’re also thinking about, but haven’t made any decisions, do you create a new product?,” Rolapp told New York Post reporter Andrew Marchand and Sports Business Journal‘s John Ourand in a podcast. “Do you do a lighter version? We haven’t made any decisions there, but you will see that. I don’t know if we’ll go team-by-team, but could you get fewer games for a lesser price? I think that’s all up for debate and conversation.”
DirecTV has been the rights holder to Sunday Ticket for almost 30 years, most recently offering the football package at $293.94 per season or $395.94 for Sunday Ticket Max with even more content. It stayed that way for quite a while, leading the NFL to seek a Sunday Ticket deal that would let them play around with how the package was distributed. “It’s been distributed for so long,” Rolapp added. “I think there’s probably a lot of opportunity between the ‘all you can eat’ and free television. I think there’s a lot of room there to explore.”
Subscription services have been targeting lower price tiers for years in order to build user bases. Sunday Ticket is an established name in the add-on subscription market so it doesn’t need to burst onto the scene like a new one would, but it’ll need to move all of the existing subscribers away from DirecTV and add new ones if YouTube wants to recoup the $2 billion it spent on licensing. A cheaper version of Sunday Ticket would obviously feel less like Sunday Ticket since the entire concept is accessing as many NFL games as humanly possible, but it would be an interesting proposition for who might only want a few extra games each Sunday that aren’t broadcast in their market.
Generally speaking, Sunday Ticket will be a lot easier to access once the rights kick over to YouTube. It’ll be available as an add-on for both YouTube and YouTube TV with features like multi-screen support, chats, polls, and other bonus content. It’ll also be priced around $300 per season, at least according to some reports.
We should learn more in the offseason about how YouTube will roll out the new version of Sunday Ticket, so stay tuned.
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