A Los Angeles federal judge overturned a shocking $4.7 billion antitrust verdict against the NFL Thursday, ruling that a misguided jury followed improper methodologies in determining the huge damages award. 

U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez, who oversaw the case, said the jury was led astray by plaintiffs lawyers and expert witnesses in rendering an award that could have been tripled under federal antitrust guidelines. 

Also read: Why the NFL Probably Won't Pay More Than a Dollar of That $4.7 Billion ‘Sunday Ticket’ Verdict

“Without the testimonies of Dr. [Daniel] Rascher and Dr. [John] Zona, no reasonable jury could have found class-wide injury or damages,” Gutierrez wrote at the end of his 16-page ruling.

Associated Press was at the Los Angeles courthouse Thursday and reported on this ruling. 

In June, a jury in the Los Angeles class-action trial agreed with the plaintiffs' argument that the NFL conspired with DirecTV to keep the price of its out-of-market games TV package, NFL Sunday Ticket, artificially high. 

The lawsuit covered 2.4 million consumers and 48,000 business over the span of the 2011 - 2022 seasons. 

As AP noted, the case, originally introduced in 2015, was dismissed in 2017 but already brought back to life once by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Speaking on CNBC earlier this month, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell didn't seem particularly worried about how it would all turn out. 

Charter Communications’ Spectrum Business said it made a deal with EverPass Media that will bring NFL Sunday Ticket and Peacock Sports Pass to bars, restaurants and other businesses in the 41-state footprint served by Spectrum.

Spectrum also said it will again carry Thursday Night Football for Spectrum Business customers this season.

In addition Spectrum is introducing a new Spectrum Business Sports Fan TV package consisting of more than 40 live and local sports channels that will be available to new business customers for an introductory price of $79.99 a month, or $59.99 a month when bundled with another Spectrum service for 12 months.

“We know how important it is for small business customers to have access to a broad portfolio of sports content so their patrons can watch all their favorite live events,” said Tom Montemagno, executive VP, programming acquisition for Charter, which operates the Spectrum brand of connectivity services. “The combination of NFL Sunday Ticket and Peacock Sports Pass via EverPass and our new Sports Fan TV tier means we can offer businesses a sports solution that includes almost all NFL games, college football, and professional basketball, hockey, baseball, soccer and more.”

EverPass was founded in 2023 in partnership with RedBird Capital Partners and 32 Equity, the strategic investment arm of the NFL. TKO Group Holdings, parent company of UFC and WWE, joined as an investor in 2024.

“We are thrilled to partner with Spectrum Business as our first official channel partner,” EverPass CEO Alex Kaplan said.

“EverPass was founded with the goal of innovating the out-of-home sports and entertainment viewing experience while also empowering business owners to have complete control of the content their customers desire,” Kaplan said. “This strategic relationship allows us to tap into Spectrum Business’ extensive network and expand access to NFL Sunday Ticket and Peacock Sports Pass for commercial establishments, further positioning EverPass as the preeminent live sports and entertainment content platform for businesses across the U.S.”

Going deep into its playbook, Verizon Communications is offering NFL Sunday Ticket to new subscribers and customers who upgrade their home internet plans or add an additional line or new device to their mobile account. 

Sunday Ticket, sold by YouTube, costs $449 a year and enables fans to watch out-of-market NFL games.

Some existing subscribers will get $100 off a season of Sunday Ticket.

Verizon is also working with YouTube to offer $10 a month off subscriptions to the YouTube TV Base plan, which cuts the monthly price to $62.99 a month from $72.99 a month.

As part of the promotion, Verizon is also offering customers an opportunity to win tickets to games from Verizon Access. Verizon said tickets to every NFL game for all 32 teams will be given away.

“Whether you watch the game on NFL Sunday Ticket, YouTube TV, or score tickets from Verizon Access, Verizon is making it easier than ever for football fans to stay connected to the game and teams they love,” a Verizon spokesperson said. “Plus, Verizon now powers all 30 NFL Stadiums with 5G Ultra Wideband technology, delivering the best experience and connectivity.“

Making his first extensive public comments since a jury ordered his league to pay billions of dollars in a class-action suit over the NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market games package, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell expressed determination to appeal the verdict. 

“Well, we obviously disagree with the jury verdict and we are committed obviously to following the legal process,” Goodell told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street Thursday from the Sun Valley media executive retreat in Idaho. “It’s a long process. We’re aware of that, but we feel very strongly about our position, our policies, particularly on media, that we make our — our sport available to the broadest possible audience.”

Also read: NFL Loses Sunday Ticket Case, Ordered To Pay $4.7 Billion

The plaintiffs successfully argued in the California federal court that the NFL violated antitrust laws and kept TV access to its games priced artificially high by marketing its Sunday Ticket audience at a robust price point and making it available to only the finite base of DirecTV subscribers. 

Residential subscribers were awarded $4.7 million, with commercial customers getting $96 million. These damages could triple to over $15 billion based on federal antitrust law. 

In his CNBC discussion, Goodell dismissed Sunday Ticket as merely a “complementary product.” 

The mighty National Football League was sacked by a jury in California which ordered the league to pay $4.7 billion in damages in an antitrust lawsuit that claimed consumers were forced to overpay for the NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market  television package.

The NFL said it plans to contest the decision.

The lawsuit was originally filed by a bar in San Francisco called the Mucky Duck and grew into a class-action suit. Damages can be tripled in antitrust suits.

Also Read: Roger Goodell Testifies in $21 Billion ‘Sunday Ticket’ Antitrust Trial: ‘We Have Been Clear Throughout That This Is a Premium Product’

The league was accused of keeping the price of Sunday Ticket high in order to keep the majority of fans watching games on broadcast and cable. The NFL has deals with its television partners that will pay it $110 billion over 11 years.

The ruling gives $4.6 billion to residential Sunday Ticket subscribers and $100 million to restaurants and bars.

Until this season, DirecTV had exclusive rights to distribute Sunday Ticket, paying $1.5 billion a year, and losing close to $1 billion on the package. 

This year, YouTube won the bidding for Sunday Ticket, agreeing to pay $2 billion a year, and made a deal with DirecTV to continue to distribute the package to commercial users.

“We are disappointed with the jury’s verdict today in the NFL Sunday Ticket class action lawsuit. We continue to believe that our media distribution strategy, which features all NFL games broadcast on free over-the-air television in the markets of the participating teams and national distribution of our most popular games, supplemented by many additional choices including RedZone, Sunday Ticket and NFL Plus, is by far the most fan-friendly distribution model in all of sports and entertainment,” the NFL said in a statement.

“We will certainly contest this decision as we believe that the class action claims in this case are baseless and without merit,” the league said.

NFL cvommissioner Roger Goodell testified in a Los Angeles federal court Monday that purchasers of the “NFL Sunday Ticket” out-of-market games package knew full well its high value, and they didn't pay more than $300 a season for it because the league colluded with broadcast partners and forced their hand. 

"We have been clear throughout that it is a premium product. Not just on pricing but quality," Goodell said during cross-examination. "Fans make that choice whether they wanted it or not. I’m sure there were fans who said it was too costly." 

(Monday's court proceedings were covered by the Associated Press and other news outlets.)

Goodell testified in a class-action suit involving more than 2.4 million residential Sunday Ticket subscribers and around 48,000 subscribing businesses, each of which paid for the package from 2011 through 2022.

By selling Sunday Ticket exclusively through DirecTV's limited pay TV ecosystem during that time at an inflated price, the plaintiffs say the NFL was able to keep charging broadcasters including Fox, CBS and NBC high prices for broadcast TV rights. 

The plaintiffs are arguing that Sunday Ticket should have been made more widely available than just DirecTV’s subscriber base, and that the package should have been sold for far less than $100.

“The NFL’s deal with DirecTV ensured that more viewers would tune into CBS and Fox, which, in turn, allowed the networks to pay the NFL a premium for the broadcasting rights,” testified plaintiff’s expert witness Daniel Rascher, a sports economist at the University of San Francisco, last week. 

If the NFL is found liable, a jury could award as much as $7 billion in damages — a number that could triple based on rules for antitrust damages. 

The NFL maintains it has the rights to sell Sunday Ticket under its antitrust exemption for broadcasting. The plaintiffs, however, respond that that exemption only covers actual broadcasting, not pay TV distribution.

“NFL Sunday Ticket” customers who get the pricey out-of-market games package via YouTube TV took to social media Sunday to voice their frustration after buffering and pixelization issues on the virtual pay TV platform impacted the first round of games.

The issues persisted into the second half of games that started at 1 p.m. EST. Google responded by diverting users to the NFL app, which would let them authenticate via their YouTube TV subscription. 

It's unclear as to how many of the estimated 1.5 million NFL Sunday Ticket subscribers were impacted. But it was enough to fully populate a few Reddit threads. 

YouTube parent Google/Alphabet assumed control of NFL Sunday Ticket late last year, after DirecTV — which had sold the package exclusively since its launch in 1995 — passed on an opportunity to pay $2 billion a season for licensing rights.

Also read: YouTube Has Around 1.5 Million ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ Subscribers, Will Lose Over $1.2 Billion This Season: Morgan Stanley

Media watchers had suspected that YouTube and YouTube TV would immediately have some kind of tech meltdown with the now live-streamed package, but that never transpired through the first seven weeks of the NFL regular season. 

Google hasn't said anything about a refund. But YouTube TV subscribers who have to pay $73 a month for their vMVPD plan in addition to $300 a year for Sunday Ticket were, by our back-of-the-napkin math, out about $33 Sunday. 

Media business watchers always assumed that with Google/Alphabet's YouTube paying around $2 billion a season to license NFL Sunday Ticket, the out-of-market games package would serve as a loss leader. 

Alphabet didn't reveal much Tuesday during its Q3 earnings call about how its Sunday Ticket business was going in season 1, but Morgan Stanley Research released projections suggesting the aforementioned loss-leader assumptions are correct. 

Morgan Stanley's estimates were tweeted out Wednesday by Forbes Media assistant managing editor Mike Ozanian, and they are compelling. 

Morgan Stanley estimates that Google has sold around 1.5 million NFL Sunday Ticket subscriptions so far through YouTube and its YouTube TV virtual pay TV platform, generating revenue of $569 million. (Notably, 80% of subscribers, the equity research outfit suggests, are not choosing the bundled YouTube TV option and are paying full $399-a-season freight.)

Projecting a first-year rights cost of $1.773 billion, Morgan Stanley projects that Google will lose $1.204 billion in its first year. It would take 3.18 million subscribers for Google/YouTube to break even. 

By 2029, the research outfit predicts, Google will have 2.5 million NFL Sunday Ticket customers, generating around $835 million in revenue. But rights costs will rise to $2.243 billion, Morgan Stanley projects, and losses will reach $1.408 billion. 

By 2029, however, it's projected that 65% of Sunday Ticket subscribers are getting it as a bundled option via YouTube, suggesting that the package is driving subscriber growth for the vMVPD. 

The Morgan Stanley math comes after Rob Thun, chief content officer for NFL Sunday Ticket’s ancestral home, DirecTV, told Sports Business Journal that the satellite pay TV company isn't having any residual regrets from letting Google take over the package. 

“Well, let me ask you a question: Do you like losing a billion dollars a year?” Thun responded when asked if DirecTV missed Sunday Ticket. 

“That was the old deal. The new deal, it’d be a billion and a half,” he added. “It didn’t make sense for our platform because … We’re losing subs because we’re a pure-play video provider and the price of content continues to escalate beyond what people are willing to pay.”

Daniel Frankel: David, glad you're back from your summer trip to Europe ... and I know you're jacked up like I am about the start of pro and college football ... not that there's any amateur football left. As an, er, avid reader of Next TV, you know that I weighed in myself over the weekend on YouTube and NFL Sunday Ticket. It doesn't take much back-of-the napkin math to quickly figure out that Google's goals are somewhat diffuse for NFL ST. But I took your advice and read Richard Greenfield's recent blog post about the topic. He surmises that YouTube TV scale is what Goog is really in it for. Why oh why would anyone still care about linear TV scale?

David Bloom: Yes, thanks, good to be back. Linear may be fading, but it ain’t gone. And delivering a bundle of entertainment that includes, for more subscriber cash, the most-watched programming on linear TV for tens of millions of NFL fans seems like not a terrible idea, even if it’s costing a couple of billion a year (chump change in AlphabetLand). The key, as always for the tech firms, is engagement, and there’s nothing more engaging than the NFL for all those fans. Just look at the Nielsen ratings for the NFL Draft (which the Roku Channel is also counting on with a new and pretty engaging documentary coming this weekend, The Pick Is In).  Remember, when we trash linear, we do so at the risk of trashing the things 60 million households apparently still like about it: access to a broad range of content for a reasonable cost (at least at one time).

Daniel: Just weird to see a digital company race into the same bundled business companies like Comcast can't seem to run away fast enough from. But my therapist says there's a lot about people I don't understand. I’ll tell you one thing — I don't get the studio chiefs and this strike. From what I hear, Tuesday's approach from the AMPTP was pretty lame -- coming from folks who should know the psychology of negotiation better than that. Sounds like they really set this whole strike process back. 

David: That reiteration aside, this whole summer has featured curious decisions by the studio chiefs, in terms of their usually buttoned-up appearances in front of the media, especially with delicate moments like the end of the streaming wars, Netflix’s now largely-in-place correction to its future shape, and the first actor-writer strikes since the momentous labor battles of 1960. The last time both unions went out, they secured important things like residuals and pensions, and restructured the economic relationships in an industry already starting to be transformed by television’s vast opportunities. This time, the studios are in a less secure place than back then. This time, their old standbys are fading (and they’re not helping by strip-mining content for streaming). And the new thing isn’t looking as easily sustainable for all of them as was hoped back in 2019. Pretty much all of them were in the room in the recent meeting with writers reps. The studios and AMPTP also released their proposal publicly, in an unusual and possibly improper attempt to bypass the negotiating committee. All it did was fire up the other side, and make them dig in more. Those moves, it’s safe to say, did not achieve whatever goals the studio chiefs sought. Who’s advising these guys these days? 

Daniel: It all harkens back to that wonderful bygone era, where a handsome, charismatic champion of labor unions, Ronald Reagan, as head of SAG led Hollywood actors to controlling their rightful share of the revenue pie! Of course, as any suddenly unemployed air-traffic controller from the early 1980s can tell you, a lot of transformative things happened to Hollywood -- and Ronny -- since that time. I guess I have Reagan trickling down my subconscious today because, 40 years after his presidency, his name still hyper-reverentially comes up over and over again every time the Republicans have a presidential primary debate. And regardless of your political orientation, Wednesday night's Fox News presentation was pretty darned compelling television. But here's what's puzzling -- Fox News is boasting only 12.8 million viewers. That's the biggest non-sports, cable TV audience of the year, beating even Yellowstone. But it's nowhere near the 24 million viewers who tuned into Fox's 2015 Republican debate. What's going on here? Is it Trump? I see his Tucker Carlson Twitter appearance has more than 238 million views as of Thursday afternoon and still climbing. What do we make of that?

David: As someone who’s covered both politics and entertainment for a very long time, I can say with some experience that the relatively low viewership of the Fox GOP debate is probably due to two things: 1) Relatively low interest beyond the deep reaches of the current Republican Party in the people who will finish second, other than perhaps vetting whether Trump should name as his VP candidate Nikki Haley, Tim Scott or the relentlessly annoying high school debate team champ Vivek Ramaswamy; 2) the continued decline of the legacy cable and broadcast outlets. Not everyone is into politics in late summer, 16 months before the election. Odd to ponder, but what are you going to do? Also, Trump’s effort to counter-program seemed at least moderately successful, even if Carlson’s fixations on issues such as UFOs and whether Trump thinks he’ll be killed by “them” made for odd conversation. (Even Trump seemed unsure quite how to respond.) But Trump is a far better TV personality than anyone on the debate stage. That said, if you’re consuming any numbers coming out of Twitter/X these days, do so with a large block of salt. What’s a “view” in ElonWorld these days? Does that mean a viewer watched 40 seconds? Or the whole 40-something minutes? How many concurrents? How many are watching a replay after it initially ran, which they really can’t do with the debate in the same way? How many bots were used to goose up viewership? 

Daniel: Yeah, there's a lot of questions on just how Elon Musk is making that metric sausage. Speaking of questionable meat byproducts, Nielsen has acquiesced to Amazon and will include the digital giant's first-party audience data in its own metrics for the upcoming season of "NFL Thursday Night Football." The more I learn about Nielsen, the more sketchy it gets. But they seem more powerful than ever these days. Take that highly compromised pie chart they publish every month. Smart people treat it like it's not just a collection of graphical dealmaking between the research company and its clients. I mean, all this disruption. All this IP-world addressability. We can't figure out a better measurement means to replace these dithering grifters? 

David: Oh, we absolutely could figure out a better way to measure your “dithering grifters,” but you may recall that said DGs are not excited about disclosing any more data than they absolutely must. Even if, somehow, the striking unions get the streaming services to agree to disclose more information, one key issue will be what third-party metric provider gets the awesome opportunity to actually track where the business is. If it’s any consolation, Ampere Analysis says there’s already 100 million subscribers to ad-supported subscription services and that they have higher ARPUs than the customers in classic ad-free tiers. As those ad-supported tiers become more of the norm (especially for second-level streamers), there’ll be more pressure for fuller disclosure from the people paying the bills, the advertisers. That’s likely to have far more impact than any strike demands.  

Daniel: Well, it's finally Friday. Another fun weekend planned. Gonna watch my Trojans play their penultimate game on the Pac-12 Network Saturday ... which is a topic for another day. 

David: The great thing about the media business is there’s always something to talk about in the middle of brain-melting technological transformation. I’ll actually be at the game on Saturday, missing out on that Pac-12 Network experience like, hmmm, 98% of the country. But turns out IRL games are pretty fun, too. Fight on!

Daniel: Oh, shit, before we get out of here, I almost forgot -- CNN on Max. How oh how do pubs like The New Yorker still write about David Zaslav as a respectable captain of media business, when he does things like dismantle a fully built CNN streaming platform (cost to build: $300 million) in May of 2022 ... then decides he actually does want one just 15 months later. In the words of Burgess Meredith's Mickey Goldmill, "This guy is a wreckin' machine!" And for the record, I think Clubber Lang might actually do a better job of managing a legacy cable news organization than David Zaslav has. 

David: Zaslav has made lots of missteps with CNN, beginning with hiring a well-respected guy who’d never run an entire news organization, to run an entire news organization in an era of secular decline and vast economic challenges for the parent company. CNN is one of those hallowed cable properties like ESPN, with a global brand and a crackerjack staff, but also great big questions about how it continues to pay for itself. It’s not just a Discovery reality show that Chris Licht was being asked to manage.  But I’d also say timing is everything. Launching CNN+ 16 months ago, as part of a brand new company staggering under $55 billion of debt, so it could stack up even more losses than HBO Max, was bad timing. The people who developed the project had no skin in the game when it finally was launched, because they were either already fired (Jeff Zucker) or about to leave because of the merger (Jason Kilar). Some sort of streaming future was absolutely imperative but maybe CNN+ was the wrong idea for the wrong company at the wrong time.. Zaslav and Licht then went on to make a lot of other bad decisions, but this one, I think, was defensible. Fast forward 16 months later, and WBD has indeed paid down a significant chunk of its debt, maybe $10 billion. CNN+ still wouldn’t make much sense, even if Max allegedly is now generating a pittance of free cash flow. But also understand that what’s proposed now is a lot cheaper than a stand-alone service like CNN+. It’s part of the Max mothership, and mostly is taking the feed of shows from CNN linear, plus some subset of original programming to enhance what’s on offer. That’s likely to be both far more compelling than CNN+’s lame show concepts, and far less costly to distribute. And it gives them a chance to learn what streaming audiences want from their globe-girdling 24-hour news organizations. 

Over the weekend, Next TV examined the lofty bar (we estimate around 6 million subscribers) that Google and YouTube need to reach in order to make their $2 billion+ investment in the NFL Sunday Ticket license profitable ... and whether the broader Alphabet has more diffuse goals (a loss leader?) for the out-of-market games package than mere bottom line. 

But already, we're seeing Google's potential to expand the reach of NFL Sunday Ticket far beyond what longtime incumbent stakeholder DirecTV was ever capable of imagining. 

On Wednesday, Google TV product managers Nick Staubach and Sal Altayyar published a company blog post, outlining how NFL Sunday Ticket will be natively integrated into the Google TV streaming operating system in the U.S. 

"This means you can now access live out-of-market Sunday afternoon games, see top highlights and get recommendations for top games of the week, all right on your Google TV home screen," the post said. "And if you’re a YouTube TV subscriber with NFL Sunday Ticket as part of your membership, the content will be available in the channel guide on your Live tab, so you can quickly find any game you’re looking for."

So right off the bat, Google can promote the package to millions of Americans on the home screens of their TVs. 

In the U.S., Google TV powers not only the popular Chromecast With Google TV CTV device, but also smart TVs made by Hisense, Sony and TCL, among other brands. 

Google said in January that there are now more than 150 million devices globally powered by Google TV and its predecessor, Android TV. 

When they agreed to pay the National Football League between $2 billion - $2.5 billion a season for NFL Sunday Ticket in April, Google and YouTube undoubtedly weighed this National Research Group survey finding -- 71% of NFL fans said they'd consider a subscription to a new streaming service to watch out-of-market NFL games. 

And there are a lot of NFL fans out there. According to a Stamford University research study, more than 143 million Americans age 13 or older watched on TV or attended an NFL game in 2021. 

So it's safe to assume that at least 6 million folks would pay around $350 a season for NFL Sunday Ticket, the live sports package, long controlled by DirecTV, that delivers live TV access to all the out-of-market games not being broadcast, cablecast or streamed to subscribers in their respective DMA. 

With YouTube's first season of Sunday Ticket set to kick off on Sunday, September 10, that's the plan, anyway. 

But just getting to break-even in year 1 might not be as simple as it sounds. 

DirecTV, which carried exclusive satellite distribution of the out-of-market package since its inception in the mid-1990s, paid around $1.5 billion for the Sunday Ticket license in 2022, its last season as distributor of the residential package. 

Before it slipped under the radar of private equity ownership, DirecTV declared having around 1.5 million to 2 million Sunday Ticket subscribers. So even on the high side of the estimate, DirecTV was losing as much as $1 billion a year with the package. (Notably, DirecTV did agree to renew its contract to show Sunday Ticket in restaurants and bars.)

Can YouTube triple that 1.5 million to 2 million?

Well, let's put it this way -- YouTube launched its virtual pay TV service, YouTube TV, six years ago. It only recently came close to reaching an estimated 6 million subscribers.   

Of course, it's a bit apples and submarines to compare YouTube -- which probably spends more aggressively than anyone still left in U.S. pay TV to promote YouTube TV and now operates the only growing concern in the linear pay TV ecosystem -- to the mature DirecTV, which loses around half a million subscribers every 90 days now. 

YouTube has diffuse goals and myriad platform businesses to support -- the math for Google/YouTube and parent company Alphabet is quite a bit more complex than simply "number of subscribers times price does-or-does-not-equal-or-surpass licensing fee."

What, for example, is the value of a subscriber that comes through Verizon's recently announced "Sunday Ticket on Us" promotion, which delivers a free season of the package to select unlimited wireless customers? 

Certainly, it makes Verizon's 5G and LTE networks more valuable, as well as the Google Android OS software that Verizon customers use to power their phones. And this is before accounting for new Sunday Ticket customers who grow to like the package and are willing to pay full freight for it in 2024, after their promotion expires. (Other telecoms offering Sunday Ticket price promotions include Frontier Communications and WOW!.)

How much does it fuel the growth in scale of YouTube TV to be able to able to offer discounted bundles of Sunday Ticket and Warner Bros. Discovery's Max?

That said, YouTube is trying to expand proliferation of Sunday Ticket by adding new UX features and price promotions, while making the package more flexible and widely available. 

YouTube breaks down pricing and features on this landing page. 

The package is currently discounted from its regular $349-a-season price to $299 when it is acquired via a $72.99-a-month YouTube subscription. (For an extra $40, you can get a full season of the complimentary NFL Red Zone channel.)

Pivotal to YouTube's play is that Sunday Ticket is available to everyone, not just YouTube TV subscribers. The package is available a la carte for $449 a season (currently discounted to $399), also with a $40 Red Zone option. 

This is, ostensibly, a new wrinkle, in that DirecTV supposedly wouldn't let you stream Sunday Ticket unless you were in a situation, such as a Manhattan apartment, where you couldn't receive southern sky satellite access. 

As Next TV reported two years ago, however, DirecTV was quietly letting many satellite-eligible non-subscribers stream Sunday Ticket if they wanted to. 

The difference now, of course, is that YouTube is freely and loudly letting everyone know that a YouTube TV subscription isn't a Sunday Ticket dealbreaker, and that removes a major point of constriction. 

Further goosing sales, YouTube is letting customers pay monthly with no penalties or fees -- you can put $99.75 down on the a la carte version, then fork over three monthly installments of $99.75 for rest of the season. Not cheap, but better than coming up with $400 all at once. (Notably, state laws prohibit this offer in certain jurisdictions, including New York and New Jersey.)

Will all of this translate into a sudden, massive influx of Sunday Ticket customers that puts Alphabet into the black in season 1? Probably not. But Alphabet and Google, which have eyes broadly on live sports, and narrowly and specifically on the NFL, appear to be in this for the full four quarters. 

Then again ... $2 billion a season is a lot of money, even by Google's standards. It's twice as much as Amazon is paying for Thursday Night Football. If Sunday Ticket sales are slow out of the gate, expect some aggressive promotional action in the weeks ahead. 

Frontier Communications has partnered with YouTube on a limited-time “NFL Sunday Ticket” promo that will give users access to every out-of-market Sunday afternoon game and over 100 live TV channels at a discounted rate.

Frontier internet customers who are subscribed to YouTube TV and sign up for NFL Sunday Ticket can save $100 through Aug. 21. New subscribers to both Frontier and YouTube TV can save up to $500 their first year vs. cable plus, get $100 off NFL Sunday Ticket through Aug. 21.

Earlier this year, Frontier partnered with YouTube TV to offer integrated billing for internet and YouTube’s live TV vMVPD.

Verizon, which already has the most aggressive "on us" promotion in the streaming business with a deal that gives select wireless customers a year free of the $20-a-month Netflix Premium tier, has announced a new promo for the NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market games package, now managed by Google and distributed via YouTube.

New Verizon customers using the company's myPlan custom bundling scheme can get a free season of NFL Sunday Ticket when they purchase select smart phones, including the Samsung Galaxy Flip5 and Pixel Fold, or if they sign up for Verizon Home Internet fixed wireless access or Fios gigabit-speed wireline internet. 

The promotion kicks off on Thursday.

Also read: Google's YouTube TV to Bundle NFL Sunday Ticket With WBD's Max

The deal is also accessible to existing Verizon Mobile customers who upgrade to Unlimited Plus, and existing Unlimited Plus customers who add a line to their Unlimited Plus plan. Existing Verizon Home Internet customers upgrading to a Fios 1 Gig, Fios 2 Gig, 5G Home Plus or LTE are also eligible. 

The rest of Verizon's existing wireless customer base can get $100 off the $449 full-season price of NFL Sunday Ticket, a price they can probably get on their own via a number of existing promotions being offered by distributors YouTube TV and YouTube.

Alphabet's YouTube is paying between $2 billion - $2.5 billion a season to take over distribution of NFL Sunday Ticket this upcoming season from incumbent distributor DirecTV. 

Verizon already has extensive marketing and tech ties to the NFL.

For example, the wireless company is delivering a new managed private wireless network solution across all 30 NFL stadiums this season, as well as the sites of games at international arenas. This includes full in-game support for on-field communications between coaches.

Verizon will also keynote sponsor major NFL events throughout the season, including the "Super Wild Card Weekend presented by Verizon" and the "2023 Pro Bowl Games presented by Verizon.

“By deepening our technology-first partnership with the NFL and now partnering with YouTube on NFL Sunday Ticket, we’re able to offer customers the ultimate fan experience wherever they are on the most reliable 5G network in America," said Hans Vestberg, chairman and CEO of Verizon, in a statement. "This partnership adds to our growing roster of the best content providers in the industry as we continue to deliver the best in choice and exclusive value to our customers.”   

Added NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell: “Verizon has been a strategic partner with the NFL since 2010 and today’s announcement is just the latest extension of this outstanding relationship."

Alphabet revealed during its second quarter earnings call Tuesday that its newly acquired NFL Sunday Ticket will be bundled with Warner Bros. Discovery's Max on virtual pay TV service YouTube TV.

The Google and YouTube parent company, which agreed earlier this year to pay the NFL $2 billion to $2.5 billion a season to take over the out-of-market games package's distribution rights, didn't disclose an pricing or other go-to-market strategy for the bundle. 

For its part, WBD has whittled down its programming ambitions for the erstwhile HBO Max, but the company seems ever-on-the lookout for synergistic marketing opportunities. 

Alphabet/Google, meanwhile, has myriad pricing promotions going on for its first year of Sunday Ticket. Notably, those who sign up for it via YouTube TV can get the regular-season NFL games package for $299, $50 off the regular price.

Google-owned YouTube TV will drop SNY, the last remaining New York City-area regional sports network on its lineup, as of July 1, the virtual MVPD said Thursday.

In an email  to subscribers, YouTube TV said that SNY — which televises New York Mets baseball games and offers coverage of the NFL’s New York Jets, among other programming — “will no longer be available on YouTube TV.” The move also eliminates all library content recorded from SNY. 

YouTube TV also said its subscribers will be able to continue watching select national Mets games on other networks such as Fox, ESPN, and TBS.

SNY on Thursday confirmed the move in a Tweet, stating that “despite our good faith efforts, YouTube TV is preparing to drop SNY and our exclusive live Mets games on July 1.” 

YouTube TV’s removal of SNY comes after the service dropped New York-based YES Network in 2020. Earlier this year the service also dropped MLB Network from its lineup.

YouTube TV will add the NFL Sunday Ticket package this fall to its offerings after Google in December purchased the distribution rights to the out-of-market package formerly distributed by DirecTV.

DirecTV will stay in the "NFL Sunday Ticket" business, after the pay TV company's commercial division signed an agreement to re-up rights to the out-of-market games package for more than 3,000 restaurants, bars and other publicly accessible U.S. establishments. 

The multi-year agreement, which kicks off with the upcoming 2023 pro football regular season, was announced without disclosed terms. Earlier reports suggested the NFL was looking to get paid around $200 million a season for exclusive Sunday Ticket commercial rights. 

However, according to CNBC, citing unnamed sources, DirecTV's deal doesn't stipulate exclusive rights. 

In December, the league announced that Google would take over rights to the main NFL Sunday Ticket package, paying a reported $2 billion a season. NFL Sunday Ticket had been an exclusive premium offering of the DirecTV satellite TV service since its inception in 1994. 

DirecTV's deal was actually with EverPass Media Reach, a new joint venture set up by the NFL and private equity firm Red Bird Capital Partners in March to manage commercial Sunday Ticket rights, and perhaps other live event rights down the road. 

As for DirecTV for Business, the division has been on an aggressive sports-rights licensing spree recently, having locked up Major League Baseball's “Friday Night Baseball” and Major League Soccer’s “MLS SEASON PASS” via Apple, as well as the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football” via Amazon Prime Video.

 “EverPass is creating a platform for commercial businesses that allows for seamless access to must-have live sports and entertainment content," said Mike Wittrock, DirecTV's chief sales and service officer, in a statement. 

"We are pleased to partner with DirecTV for Business in this multi-year agreement to deliver NFL Sunday Ticket,” added EverPass CEO Alex Kaplan.

Google-owned YouTube, which just agreed to pay the National Football League $2.5 billion a season for the “NFL Sunday Ticket” out-of-market games package, is jacking up the price.

YouTube TV subscribers who don’t sign up during the early-bird enlistment period (April 11-June 6) and take advantage of a $100 discount, will pay $349 a season for Sunday Ticket, up from the $293 incumbent platform DirecTV had been charging. 

Notably, Google just upped the price of YouTube TV from $64.99 a month to $72.99 monthly. 

Also read: Google Plans To Punch Up ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ With New Features

YouTube is also letting customers who don't pay for its virtual MVPD sign up for Sunday Ticket through YouTube Primetime Channels, but they’ll pay a $100 premium, upping the total price to $449 a year. 

YouTube TV and Primetime Channels subscribers can also bundle in NFL RedZone for an extra $40 a season, never missing a scoring possession. 

Sunday Ticket is migrating to YouTube this year after spending its first three formative decades exclusively at DirecTV. 

The National Football League has entered into a joint venture with private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners to stream ”NFL Sunday Ticket“ in bars, restaurants and other public dining and entertainment establishments, starting this upcoming football season. 

The JV, called EverPass Media, will become the exclusive commercial distributor of NFL Sunday Ticket and could potentially also distribute other live sporting events down the road. 

EverPass will be led by Derek Chang and Alex Kaplan, who notably worked closely with the NFL on Sunday Ticket while employed by incumbent distributor DirecTV. 

For its part, DirecTV, which just ended a decades-long partnership with the NFL for the residential Sunday Ticket business, said it's still in play to retain the commercial side of the out-of-market regular-season games package. 

“DirecTV delivers market-leading sports content to bars, restaurants and other commercial establishments across the U.S. including exclusive access to MLS Season Pass and MLB Friday Night Baseball, as well as Thursday Night Football, with more games and leagues on the horizon. We are in discussions with RedBird Capital to deliver NFL Sunday Ticket to our 300,000-plus commercial venues as only satellite can provide a consistent and reliable experience in venues and across locations that fans have come to expect," DirecTV said in a statement sent to Next TV Tuesday night. 

In December, Google/Alphabet entered into a multiyear agreement to take over the residential Sunday Ticket, paying from $2 billion to $2.5 billion to sell the add-on package through its YouTube TV virtual pay TV service. 

According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the RedBird deal, the commercial Sunday Ticket contract is worth around $200 million a season. And DirecTV, which has carried the package since it debuted in 1994, had hoped to retain the commercial business. ■

DirecTV for Business has entered a deal with Apple to provide MLS Season Pass to its network of more than 300,000 restaurants, bars, hotel lounges, retail shops and other venues during the 2023 MLS season on their existing satellite equipment.

Starting Feb. 25, when the 2023 MLS season begins, DirecTV for Business establishments will be able to show every regular season MLS match, as well as the MLS Cup Playoffs. In between, events such as the MLS All-Star Game will also be included. (You can see a schedule of MLS Season Pass events here.)

“We welcome the addition of MLS Season Pass to an already market-leading lineup of sports properties that our commercial customers can continue to receive seamlessly through their existing satellite equipment and offer to their patrons," said Rob Thun, DirecTV chief content officer, in a statement. 

Apple announced back in November that it agreed to pay Major League Soccer $2.5 billion over the next 10 years to form the MLS Season Pass streaming package, an add-on within the Apple TV app that runs consumers $14.99 a month.

DirecTV didn't detail the pricing model for its business customers. 

The sub-licensing deal for the streaming games package follows a similar agreement DirecTV for Business entered into back in August for NFL "Thursday Night Football" -- a property that Amazon is now paying $1 billion a season to license. 

DirecTV recently demurred on extending its decades-long partnership with the NFL for the "NFL Sunday Ticket" out-of-market games package which, up until December when the NFL's regular season ended, the pay TV company had been paying $1.5 billion a season to carry. 

With Google/Alphabet and its YouTube unit ending up with "Sunday Ticket," there has been speculation that DirecTV might enter a sub-licensing agreement with Alphabet to show the package in bars and restaurants. 

DirecTV wouldn't comment about this, but an individual familiar with the company's dealings said that it's talking to "everyone about major sports properties that have gone to streaming." 

Paying a reported $2.5 billion a season to take over NFL Sunday Ticket from longtime licensor DirecTV, Google plans to modernize the offense. 

“On YouTube TV, we’re building the ability for subscribers to watch multiple screens at once,“ Philipp Schindler, chief business officer for Google, said during parent company Alphabet's Q4 earnings call Thursday. “And on YouTube, we’ll be adding new features specific to the Sunday Ticket experience, like comments, chats, polls, and so on.”  

The new features will include things users can do with social video. 

“On the creator side, imagine all the creative ways they can create with exclusive NFL content, behind-the-scenes event access and so on,” Schindler added. "We’re really excited to see what they will do across long-form, short-form, livestreams and more.”

Google plans to make the NFL’s out-of-market games package an add-on component to its virtual pay TV service, YouTube TV. The company will also offer Sunday Ticket a la carte via YouTube Primetime Channels. 

The tech giant hasn’t disclosed pricing yet. 

“We think there are a lot of great opportunities to differentiate the user and creator experience with our unique capabilities,” Schindler added. 

With the value proposition for both the NFL and DirecTV waning in the latter years of their Sunday Ticket partnership, as the linear satellite-TV business eroded, the league sought out a streaming partner to take over the franchise ... and hopefully breathe some life back into it. 

For its part, Google continued to say that its YouTube subscriptions business, which is spearheaded by YouTube TV, is growing, although the company didn’t elaborate on the vMVPD’s subscriber expansion. The service is believed to have more than 5 million paid users at this point. 

In terms of advertising, YouTube’s recent position isn't as strong — its ad revenue declined 8% in 2022 to just under $8 billion. ■

Moving  “NFL Sunday Ticket” to Google’s YouTube TV and YouTube Premium Channels may help the National Football League reach more consumers and enable more fans to subscribe to the out-of-market package.

The NFL announced its long-awaited decision on Wednesday. As football is the most popular programming on television, the move could have a seismic effect as sports migrate from traditional pay TV to streaming.

According to a recent survey by the National Research Group, 71% of NFL fans say they’d consider adding a subscription to a new streaming service in order to watch out-of-market Sunday Ticket games. That includes 19% who said they’d subscribe regardless of what other content is in the package.

About 60% of NFL fans said they’d watch Sunday Ticket games on a weekly basis if they had access.

The survey found that many fans are already streaming games, with 60% of fans under 35 years old streaming at least one game per week live on a TV screen.

In a survey of NFL fans by The Streamable, 35% said that YouTube was their preferred destination for NFL Sunday Ticket. More than twice as many fans preferred YouTube over Apple TV Plus as the new streaming home for NFL Sunday Ticket.

The Streamable surveyed 5,018 NFL fans.

Also: The NFL Gets a Shiny New Streaming Partner With Google for ‘Sunday Ticket,’ But Have We Hit Peak Sports Rights? (Bloom)

“There is a clear customer preference for Sunday Ticket to go to YouTube,” said Jason Gurwin, CEO of The Streamable. “For the NFL, bringing Sunday Ticket to YouTube gives them access to one of the largest streaming platforms, only behind Netflix for viewing hours on connected TV devices. If the NFL wants to have the widest distribution for Sunday Ticket on a single streamer, this is a huge opportunity for them.”

Sunday Ticket should bring more attention to Google-owned YouTube, which is reportedly paying $2 billion per year over seven years for the package. YouTube already has the biggest share of TV viewing among streamers, according to Nielsen.

“Sunday Ticket would give sports viewers a reason to open the app every Sunday. It also brings a unique property to YouTube TV that none of the other live TV streaming services can offer,” Gurwin said.

The NFL this season made Amazon Prime Video the exclusive national home of its Thursday Night Football games, a history-making first time for a streamer. Putting Sunday Ticket on another streaming package might be a two-minute warning for broadcast and cable.

“As with all of television, the future of live sports is undergoing a systemic shift away from pure legacy models to likely more lucrative streaming models where most of Americans now consume content,” Ashwin Navin, co-founder and CEO of Samba TV, said.

“YouTube’s move to take programming that has historically been exclusively available to traditional TV subscribers and make it available to its streaming viewers will only hasten the secular decline of linear television as it begins to lose more and more of its last major hold on household audiences,” Navin said. “The numbers speak for themselves as to the impact football’s continued exodus will have on cable — every single one of the top 10 linear television programs in November were NFL games, and we are now speeding towards a future where many of these games and those of other sports, including baseball and basketball, will be streaming-first.”

Other bidders for Sunday Ticket included Apple, Disney’s ESPN and Amazon’s Prime Video. 

In The Streamable’s survey 23% more fans wanted Sunday Ticket to go to YouTube than Amazon Prime Video, 73% more than ESPN Plus and 122% more than Apple TV Plus.

While the move to YouTube was popular with fans, the current $300 base price for Sunday Ticket is not. YouTube and the NFL did not disclose their plans for pricing Sunday Ticket as a streaming package.

In an earlier survey of 2,562 NFL fans, The Streamable found half said they definitely will or are likely to subscribe to Sunday Ticket, which offers telecasts from CBS and Fox that aren’t available in local markets, but only 26% of fans are willing to pay the current $300 base price.

Because the NFL has made contractual promises to preserve viewing of games on broadcast, the price tag on Sunday Ticket is expected to remain high. 

The Streamable found that a base price of $150 to $200 could increase potential subscribers by 1.67 to 1.94 times compared to the current $300 base price.

If it can’t drop the price, YouTube will have to get creative by providing other incentives for new subscribers that reduce the effective cost to the consumer, the Streamable said. This could include offering discounted subscriptions for new YouTube TV customers.

Losing Sunday Ticket can’t be good for DirecTV, which was losing money on the package at $1.5 billion annually and balked at a price hike. 

Also: DirecTV Lost 500,000 Subs in Third Quarter, Fitch Says

AT&T which spun off DirecTV in 2021, paid DirecTV $2.1 billion to cover losses stemming from the NFL Sunday Ticket contract.

DirecTV has been making it easier for non-satellite TV consumers to stream Sunday Ticket, but some subscribers may drop the service if they don’t need it to watch NFL games.

DirecTV has about 1.5 million Sunday Ticket subscribers. When Apple appeared to be the front-runner to take over Sunday Ticket, DirecTV offered to help retain current subscribers by offering to serve as a storefront for Apple, passing along subscriber fees paid by DirecTV customers. It was expected that DirecTV would offer similar assistance to YouTube. 

DirecTV has been marketing itself as a service where viewers can watch live sports as well as on-demand entertainment. It continues to offer the sports that are on the broadcast network affiliates, national sports channels like ESPN and regional sports networks.

It has also been looking to beat back the streaming tide by integrating services like Discovery Plus and Peacock, making it easier for its users to watch streaming content. ■

Finally, the NFL gets a new dance partner to stream another corner of its far-flung TV operations. After many months of wrangling, and the notable bow-out of the world’s most valuable consumer company, Alphabet will pony up $14 billion over the next seven years to show hungry football fans the games they couldn’t watch in their home markets with the “NFL Sunday Ticket” premium package.

That’s $3 billion more, for four fewer years, than Amazon is paying for Thursday Night Football in a deal that started this fall. It’s eight times more than Apple is paying for a very different and far less popular (in the United States) kind of football, Major League Soccer, for access to pretty much every corner of MLS game viewing over a decade. 

Also read: NFL, Google Announce ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ Is Coming to YouTube TV, YouTube Primetime Channels

This deal, well, it’s a lot for not that much of the NFL video empire. And perhaps it’s about as big as deals will get going forward in the increasingly bubble-y world of TV rights to live sports events. It’s worth asking if we’re finally reaching Peak Sports Rights, just as we appear to have hit the long-predicted Peak TV more generally. 

That said, this appears likely to be a big deal for Alphabet’s virtual MVPD service, YouTube TV, and for Sunday Ticket, which has been under house arrest on the fading DirecTV for far too long. 

YouTube TV has evolved massively on the way to a sector-leading 5 million subscribers. Having the NFL package to market alongside its other entertainment, sports and news offerings will create a useful halo of prestige and breadth of options that should appeal to many potential new customers.   

And given that part of the cost heretofore of subscribing to Sunday Ticket required festooning your domicile with a satellite dish, easy access to an online streaming package should be a big improvement. For a significant subset of NFL fans, it likely will spur signups and maybe even ad deals for YouTube TV itself. That’s certainly part of Alphabet’s value calculus.  

Notably, Sunday Ticket also will be available as part of YouTube’s Primetime Channels, expanding access that could further drive signups. You don’t have to subscribe to YouTube TV to get a full dose of NFL games. For a set of folks who don’t care about traditional cable offerings or, more likely, get them somewhere else, this is good. 

Price could be an issue for the relocated service, though. Under DirecTV, the base service cost nearly $300, with access to Red Zone and fantasy sports programming costing another $100. 

One survey of more than 2,500 regular NFL watchers suggested more than 40% of those who had never subscribed to DirecTV’s version would be up for a streamed Sunday Ticket. That’s promising. 

Also read: Move To YouTube Could Boost Number of NFL Sunday Ticket Subscribers

But price will matter when it comes to actually signing up, especially in a weakening economy. Barely a quarter of survey respondents said they would sign up at the $300 price. Cut it by a third to half, and the likelihood of signing up nearly doubles.  

Certainly, plenty of other signs suggest people are embracing streaming sports with gusto. Comcast has been crowing about the stellar ratings and ad results on Peacock and Telemundo for its Spanish-language streams of soccer’s World Cup. 

Even the chronically uninteresting ESPN Plus now claims 24.3 million subscribers. That’s up a ringing 42% in a year, though at least partly that’s because of ESPN Plus’s presence in the Disney Plus/Hulu bundle, which basically throws in the sports service for free. 

Sinclair’s struggling skein of 19 regional sports networks, Bally Sports, just did its own streaming deal, with YouTube TV competitor FuboTV. As Next TV’s managing editor pointed out, the deal “does little to clarify” the parlous perch upon which Bally sits amid cable TV’s cord-cutting limbo. But until bankruptcy overtakes Bally Sports, Fubo has another notable programming source for its marketing as the sports fan’s vMVPD. 

Not to be lost in the Alphabet-NFL deal is this: it also marks the limits of Apple’s free-spending habits for Apple TV Plus. Apple launched Friday Night Baseball last April with MLB. In February, it starts that very interesting, 360-degree rights deal with MLS. Neither costs anything like the Sunday Ticket deal, but both provide Apple with many of the same benefits on a much smaller scale. 

Apple did spend months dickering with the NFL about Sunday Ticket, and was considered the frontrunner to win the rights for much of that time. 

Then, a few days before this week’s announcement, Apple executives decided they “don’t see the logic” behind spending Two Large (or more; reports ranged as high as $3.5 billion) on a small slice of the NFL pie. That’s a harsh assessment that might give others pause when they’re pondering further sports rights deals. 

And it’s not like Apple doesn’t have the money to do a deal this dear.  

The company’s market valuation, even in this market, tops $2.1 trillion. It generated $90 billion in revenues in its last quarter. And with Apple TV Plus, it has quickly built a reputation in Hollywood as the deepest pocket in town.   

But now we know how deep that pocket really is. 

Perhaps Apple executives (and Warner Bros. Discovery’s CEO David Zaslav, who has voiced similar reservations) aren’t completely sold on the long-term value of live sports, at least at this kind of price. 

Why spend billions of dollars to rent someone else’s content that has virtually no market value two days after it’s created? Maybe they decide to splash out more money elsewhere for their streaming brand, or do sports deals at a more reasonable price, or better return on investment.

Zaslav has mused publicly in recent weeks about WBD’s deal with the NBA, which should be up for renewal discussions soon. Given WBD’s many other financial challenges, does it want to keep propping up TNT with another expensive NBA deal? Would the NBA have a future place on the reshaped and renamed Max streaming service? What’s the value proposition for other live sports on other services in the future, and what does that mean for broad general streaming services? 

It’s too soon to say that Peak Sports Rights has arrived. Until we get another round of deals, like the soon-to-expire NBA and the Pac-12 Network deals, we won’t have the market comps to make any judgments. But for leagues that have counted on endlessly higher prices for their TV rights, the fact that even Apple may have spending limits has to send a chill. ▪️

The National Football League announced a multi-year agreement with Google that will bring the “NFL Sunday Ticket” package of out-of-market games to YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels.

NFL Sunday Ticket has been available through DirecTV since 1994, but that deal expired. DirecTV, which had been paying about $1.5 billion per year, decided it wasn’t worth paying the higher price the league was demanding.

Financial terms and the price for the service were not disclosed. Google will reportedly be paying the NFL $2.5 billion annually for Sunday Ticket, which offers Sunday-afternoon telecasts from CBS and Fox in markets where the games aren’t available locally. The move indicates deep-pocketed tech companies are willing to spend to bring high-profile sports to their streaming platforms.

Sports was seen as the last bastion of traditional linear TV, but increasingly games are becoming available via streaming to cord-cutters no longer willing to buy pricey cable and satellite subscriptions.

NFL Thursday Night Football is on Amazon Prime Video and Major League Baseball games are on Apple TV Plus.

Apple had been the front-runner to win Sunday Ticket, but reportedly pulled out. The Walt Disney Co. and Amazon were also contenders.

“We’re excited to bring NFL Sunday Ticket to YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels and usher in a new era of how fans across the United States watch and follow the NFL,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said. “For a number of years we have been focused on increased digital distribution of our games and this partnership is yet another example of us looking towards the future and building the next generation of NFL fans.”

Starting next season, NFL Sunday Ticket will be available on two of YouTube's growing subscription businesses: as an add-on package on YouTube TV and as a standalone, a la carte offering on YouTube Primetime Channels.

“YouTube has long been a home for football fans, whether they're streaming live games, keeping up with their home team or watching the best plays in highlights,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said. “Through this expanded partnership with the NFL, viewers will now also be able to experience the game they love in compelling and innovative ways through YouTube TV or YouTube Primetime Channels. We're excited to continue our work with the NFL to make YouTube a great place for sports lovers everywhere.”

The NFL and YouTube said they will work together to determine additional ways to support distribution of NFL Sunday Ticket in commercial establishments, such as bars and restaurants.

As part of the agreement, YouTube and the NFL will facilitate exclusive access to official content and attendance opportunities for select YouTube Creators at key NFL tentpole events. YouTube is now also the presenting sponsor of both “Back Together Saturday” and “NFL Kickoff Weekend.” Back Together Saturday is the league’s official start to training camp, when all 32 NFL clubs hold practices with club-led fan events.

“As the ways fans enjoy NFL football evolve in a changing media landscape, partnerships with innovators like YouTube will ensure that more games are available to more fans,” Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and chairman of the NFL’s Media Committee, said. “This partnership will grow our game for future generations and allow them to follow their favorite sport.” ■

Eight months after it reported that Apple had already made a deal to license "NFL Sunday Ticket" and was merely figuring out announcement timing, Puck News said that the tech giant has backed away from the pricey out-of-market games package.

And in the suddenly fast-moving negotiations, The New York Times reported Tuesday that Google has emerged as the latest favorite, with the tech giant said to be willing to pay as much as $2.5 billion to acquire the rights. Google would use the premium out-of-market NFL games package to augment its YouTube TV virtual pay TV service, which has over 5 million subscribers. 

If the well-substantiated $2.5 billion figure holds up, that will be about $1 billion more a season than incumbent "Sunday Ticket" carrier DirecTV is paying right now. 

According to Puck, price wasn't a consideration for Apple and its $3 trillion market capitalization. Rather, the company merely took a sober look at what the rights package will do for its business. 

Apple was reportedly concerned about "NFL Sunday Ticket's" local blackout restrictions and its total lack of international reach. Apple also wants to somehow integrate the games package -- which DirecTV sells for about $300 per season -- into its $6.99-a-month Apple TV Plus subscription, Puck said. 

With Disney and newly restored CEO Bob Iger demurring on "NFL Sunday Ticket" for ESPN, as well, that left Amazon and Google as the sole remaining bidders for the package, which culminates a three-decade relationship with DirecTV upon the conclusion of the current NFL regular season on January 8. 

Amazon already pays the NFL more than $100 million per season for rights to the "Thursday Night Football" franchise. 

DirecTV said technical issues that caused widespread streaming disruption for customers using the over-the-top version of NFL Sunday Ticket during the first two weeks of the season were resolved for Sunday's games. 

“In week 3 we saw record high concurrent streams with zero systemwide viewing or ordering issues," a DirecTV spokesperson told Next TV via email. "Our customers were able to enjoy the games throughout the day, and we've worked directly with the limited number of those who might have needed 1-1 attention based on their unique circumstances.”

Also read: DirecTV Starts Season 0-3 in Regard to Smooth ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ Streaming

Since NFL Sunday Ticket started its 2022 season with live coverage of the Sunday Sept. 11 NFL regular-season game schedule, those using the DTC version of the service, NFLSundayTicket.tv, have complained about myriad technical problems. 

There were complaints this past Sunday, too. But unlike the previous two Sundays, DirecTV insisted those were anomalies -- there were no system-wide technical issues this time. 

After being the exclusive distributor of the Sunday Ticket out-of-market games package for the last quarter-century, DirecTV is currently paying around $1 billion to license what will be its last season as primary license holder. 

Notably, while it disputed Next TV's Tuesday report about week 3 streaming issues, DirecTV reps didn't take issue with our long-postulated theory that it is no longer restricting access to the DTC version of Sunday Ticket only to customers who are unable to receive DirecTV satellite pay TV service. 

For all intent and purposes, DirecTV is now marketing Sunday Ticket as a DTC streaming package, available in app form -- or directly from DirecTV's website -- without a DirecTV subscription. 

Indeed, the landing page for NFL Sunday Ticket searches now directs users to sign up for the DTC version of the package. If you look for it, DirecTV still includes messaging saying the service remains restricted to apartment dwellers and others who can't properly hang a DirecTV satellite dish on their rooftop. 

But despite that disclaimer, pretty much anyone now seems able to sign up for the service. 

The NFL has reportedly coveted DTC streaming access to the Sunday Ticket package. Bidders to assume its rights include Google, Apple, Amazon and Disney. 

Update: Read DirecTV's response here. 

Traditionally throughout the history of the NFL, vagabond, lame-duck franchises on their way out of town for a new stadium deal in another city don't contend for Super Bowls. 

Judging by the rampant social-media complaints during the first three weeks of the NFL regular season — DirecTV's last as holder of “NFL Sunday Ticket” rights — the pay TV company’s streaming tech for the out-of-market games package is far from being a championship contender. 

In those first three weeks, Twitter has been beset with Sunday Ticket users complaining about the performance of the NFLSundayTicket.tv site and app. 

DirecTV seems to have been generally responsive to these social-media complaints, asking users to direct-message the company to seek resolution. 

Publicly, however, the company hasn't acknowledged any widespread problems with its streaming tech. 

We have a theory that there definitely is a problem — and we know what it is. 

In November of last year, Next TV noted email marketing come-ons that it had been receiving at its Los Angeles office, directly from the NFL on “behalf of DirecTV,” asking us to sign up for NFLSundayTicket.tv, the DTC streaming version of the linear service long enjoyed by DirecTV satellite subscribers. 

Also read: The NFL Quietly Takes ‘Sunday Ticket’ DTC and OTT

NFLSundayTicket.tv has long been available to the segment of American consumers who can't mount a satellite dish pointed to the southern sky, mainly apartment-dwellers. Lo and behold, our Mid-City Los Angeles duplex, which once had no less than five satellite dishes mounted on its rooftop by previous owners, was eligible to receive the DTC iteration of the service. 

Indeed, friends, family members and hangers-on situated in single-story homes with satellite-capable rooftops all over Southern California also discovered themselves eligible for NFLSundayTicket.tv … although one reader in Green Bay, Wisconsin said he was denied because his condo is eligible for satellite service. 

DirecTV, which had just been spun off from AT&T in a 70/30 deal with private equity company TPG at the time, denied that Sunday Ticket was being taken over-the-top and direct-to-consumer. 

However, punch in the term “NFL Sunday Ticket” into your web browser today, and the first landing page that surfaces is one for the NFLSundayTicket.tv streaming package, inviting visitors to “stream NFL games today” with “no satellite required.” 

If you look for it, you'll notice that this landing page does feature the disclaimer that the Sunday Ticket service “is only available to non-DirecTV customers who live in select multi-dwelling unit buildings (apartments, condos, etc.) nationwide in the U.S. where DirecTV service is not available.” 

We suspect, however, that the NFL — which has been transparent about wanting to open Sunday Ticket to streaming consumers — has plied pressure to DirecTV to open the NFLSundayTicket.tv tent, and that the pay TV provider isn't enforcing the traditional restrictions in a number of regions. 

We also suspect that DirecTV‘s infrastructure hasn't been able to handle the influx of streaming customers. And in the last year of its contract, DirecTV isn't too eager to invest much into fixing the problem. 

DirecTV will pay the NFL another $1 billion this season to finish its three-decade term as the exclusive Sunday Ticket rights holder. Apple, Amazon, Google and The Walt Disney Co. are bidding to take over the contract. ▪️

Google has reportedly entered the bidding for NFL Sunday Ticket, which already has a competitive field of aspirants including Apple, Amazon and Disney/ESPN.

According to the New York Times, Google is bidding on behalf of its YouTube unit for the NFL's popular out-of-market games package, which breaks free from its ancient ties with DirecTV after this coming season. 

It's believed that the winning bidder will pay more than $2.5 billion a year to acquire the rights to the package, which delivers every regular season NFL game to viewers not being played in their town. 

DirecTV, which has controlled NFL Sunday Ticket rights since the mid-1990s, is said to be losing as much as $500 million per year on the package, which is priced at just under $300 per season. 

However, NFL Sunday Ticket has held steady for DirecTV at around 2 million subscribers, making it a key anchor at a time when the pay TV service has taken on heavy customers losses due to cord cutting. 

For months, Apple has reportedly had the inside track, with one pundit declaring the biggest of all tech giants the imminent winner of the bid over the spring. 

In its Sunday report, the New York Times confirms Apple's desire to acquire the asset, noting that CEO Tim Cook has even taken meetings with league owners including the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones and the Kraft family, who control the New England Patriots.

The Times also spoke to former Disney CEO Bob Iger, who lamented the notion of tech giants, who have far deeper pockets to license live sports merely for the "platform engagement" they provide, and not beholden to the same gravity of ratings points and advertisers that traditional media companies are. 

“It’s hard when you’re competing with entities that aren’t playing by the same financial rules,” Iger said. 

Meanwhile, the NFL continues to covet having the biggest remaining draw in live TV. 

“A number of companies are in strong position to potentially land Sunday Ticket, but we still have a ways to go in this process,” said Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s chief media and business officer, in a statement. ■

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell confirmed the obvious — the league's “NFL Sunday Ticket” out-of-market games package is moving away from the only home it has ever known after this season, DirecTV. 

Speaking to CNBC during this week's Sun Valley mucky-muck confab, he also made a comment that seemed to narrow the NFL's ultimate choice of winning bidder to Apple and Amazon. 

“I clearly believe we will be moving to a streaming service,” Goodell said. 

Also read: Could NFL Sunday Ticket Do for Apple TV Plus What It Did for DirecTV?

Apple and Amazon are currently bidding against each other, as well as Disney/ESPN, to assume rights to the premium add-on TV package, which is currently licensed by DirecTV for around $1 billion a year. 

DirecTV has licensed NFL Sunday Ticket since the satellite TV's emergence as a pay TV player in the mid-1990s, an arrangement Goodell said “has worked very well.”

“But we really believe that these new platforms give us the ability to innovate beyond where we are today for our customers and especially younger demos,” he said.

The league recently re-upped most of its TV deals, primarily sticking with traditional media incumbents in multiyear pacts that are collectively valued at around $110 billion and stretch out for the next decade. 

Notably, Amazon stepped in with a $1 billion-a-season, multiyear commitment to assume exclusive control of Thursday Night Football starting this season. 

Apple has yet to make big NFL play, but it has already secured several big sports rights packages, including MLB’s Friday Night Baseball and exclusive coverage of Major League Soccer.

The word is that Apple, Amazon and The Walt Disney Co., possessors of three of the deepest pockets in the media business, are the sole remaining bidders for the National Football League’s out-of-market programming package, NFL Sunday Ticket.  While a lot of the talk around the deal is the price tag — at $2.5 billion to $3 billion annually, it is about twice what current rightsholder DirecTV paid for the package in 2014 — what could be most valuable to the streaming bidders is the impact Sunday Ticket could have on subscriber growth. 

There is no doubt that each of the three players have the financial strength to handle a deal. Apple has a $2.29 trillion market cap, Amazon’s is $1.15 trillion and Disney is, well, Disney. And even though all three could use access to the out-of-market package to their respective advantage, it seems at least for now that the one that would benefit most would be Apple.

In an interview, LHB Media & Entertainment president and CEO Lee Berke said that while Sunday Ticket helped DirecTV establish its linear satellite TV business nearly 30 years ago, the package is most likely to benefit streamers today.

“Now, I think it is best offered up as a streaming product because you want increased bandwidth, you want to come up with betting channels, you want to come up with all sorts of variations,” Berke said, adding that in addition to games, there are opportunities like the Manningcast [Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli]  and other peripheral programming that could be tied to the package. Also part of the mix are equity stakes in NFL Media — which houses NFL Network and RedZone — and possibly mobile rights, which could allow a streamer the chance to price and package services more creatively. 

“There have been all sorts of opportunities that haven’t been exploited in part because there is a limited amount of bandwidth on satellite,” Berke added. “I think that’s why you’re looking at a substantial streaming presence for Sunday Ticket going forward that allows you to exploit those games in more and different ways than you have in the past.”   

It’s Apple’s Deal to Lose 

While all three bidders have a streaming presence, Berke believes that Sunday Ticket makes the most sense for Apple TV Plus.

“I think that the overall heritage and philosophy of the NFL from a media standpoint is not to put all of your eggs in one basket,” Berke said. “They like to have as many different media companies as possible involved, because you’re not beholden to any one, you get them to compete, they try different approaches, they create, they’re inventive. Since you have Amazon making a major investment in Thursday Night Football, it just seems like Apple, now developing its sports resources with Major League Baseball and MLS, it seems like the next step would be establishing an NFL relationship as well.”

Amazon is paying an estimated $1 billion per year for Thursday Night Football rights. 

While The NFL would likely gain from a closer relationship with the hardware juggernaut, Apple too could use the relationship to create its own opportunities.

“I think there’s upside because everybody is looking at it like there is this finite number of games. No there’s not,” Berke said. “The NFL on its own created RedZone out of this. They created a Fantasy [Football] channel out of it. Now you bring in somebody else with a huge amount of expertise — an Apple, Amazon or Disney. It seems like you’ll get  some other very creative people, some very tech-savvy people that can come up with all sorts of variations.”

Berke added that the attractiveness of Sunday Ticket wouldn’t stop at just bringing more subscribers into the streaming video fold. 

“It’s not just the profitability of the media,” Berke said. “For Apple, does it help them sell hardware? Does it help them sell watches? Does it offer unique functions on an iPad when you get Sunday Ticket? Those are really, really valuable things.” 

Apple also seems more than willing to dive deeply into sports rights after years of sitting on the sidelines. Earlier this month, the company restarted talks for rights to Big Ten Conference college football, which recently expanded to 16 teams by adding Pac-12 powerhouses USC and UCLA.

“[Apple’s] content appetite is seemingly insatiable between Apple TV Plus originals, MLB, MLS and maybe Sunday Ticket OTT,” Wells Fargo media analyst Steven Cahall wrote in a recent research note.

Streaming Growth 

Apple, despite its dominance in the tech sector, is lagging significantly behind its peers in the streaming video business. Launched on November 1, 2019, Apple TV Plus has about 25 million subscribers paying $4.99 per month for its video streaming service. In contrast, Disney Plus — launched 11 days later on November 12, 2019 — has 137 million global customers. Amazon Prime Video has around 200 million subscribers, but most of those are there for the free shipping from Amazon Prime.  

But streamers have seen the explosive subscriber growth of the past few years begin to slow in recent quarters, as inflation, the overall economy and subscriber fatigue have caused consumers to cut back. While most point to Netflix’s 200,000-subscriber loss in Q1 as a sign that streaming was losing its luster, other SVOD companies have seen growth slow. Disney Plus added 2 million subscribers in fiscal Q4 — half of what analysts expected — but seemed to rebound in later quarters, with fiscal Q1 streaming subscriber additions rising by 11.2 million and in fiscal Q2 additions up by 9.2 million. But there are fears that consumers are backing away from some streaming services because of rising monthly charges, prompting many to offer ad-supported versions of their service at reduced fees. 

Tick, Tick, Tick 

There are still a lot of ways this could play out. In 2021, Amazon was said to be the front-runner for Sunday Ticket, with that momentum shifting to Apple in April 2022. More recently, speculation is that DirecTV could still be in the mix, opting to share rights with a streamer or reaching a deal to retain lucrative commercial rights (sports bars and restaurants) for the package. The NFL also could decide to keep Sunday Ticket in-house, possibly making it available through its own direct-to-consumer offering — NFL Plus — which is expected to launch in July. 

And there is still a lot of time to hammer out an agreement. DirecTV’s exclusivity doesn’t expire until after the 2022-23 season, giving several months for further negotiations. 

On the other hand, it is getting close to the time that the NFL has announced previous renewals — DirecTV signed an eight-year extension for Sunday Ticket in October 2014, a month after the final season under its old deal began. Whether this will take longer is anyone’s guess. 

Do You Wanna Pay for Some Football?

While Sunday Ticket has been around for nearly 30 years, its value depends on who owns the rights. In DirecTV’s early days, it was a big catalyst for subscribers to its satellite TV service — you still have to subscribe to DirecTV linear to get access to Sunday Ticket — and paid off in spades in subscriber growth. While there were other factors such as pricing, quality of service, clearer pictures, a national footprint and access to then-rare HDTV channels, Sunday Ticket helped push DirecTV into the No. 1 spot among TV distributors. A year after DirecTV launched Sunday Ticket in 1994, its subscriber base nearly quadrupled from 332,000 in 1994 to 1.2 million in 1995. By 2014 the satellite service had more than 20 million customers. 

Will Sunday Ticket have the same impact on its new owners? Probably not. It’s not even having the same impact on DirecTV, which has shed a huge number of subscribers over the years — it had 14.6 million as of Q2 — all while it continued to offer Sunday Ticket. DirecTV does not reveal subscriber numbers for Sunday Ticket, but estimates put it at around 2 million customers. Other reports estimate that DirecTV is losing about $500 million per year on Sunday Ticket.  

At Kagan, the media research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, research director Deana Myers believes the subscriber tally for Sunday Ticket is “well below” 2 million, and while she sees the package having some benefit to streamers, don’t count on it being too dramatic. 

“I think getting Sunday Ticket would likely put Apple TV Plus on the map, but not to the degree that it did for DirecTV,” Myers wrote in an email message. “Sunday Ticket’s value for DirecTV was that it drew a lot of really high-end subscribers who would sign up for the top packages. In the old, successful pay TV world that worked, but it loses a lot of money today for them. Apple could gain subs, they have the cash for such a deal, they have been buying a lot of sports rights and it could help them with their main goal of selling more devices.” 

But Berke believes the benefit of Sunday Ticket lies in more than just a beefier subscriber base.   

“If Apple is potentially a co-owner of NFL Media and they come up with five different ways to take that package and off it up in different fashions and if it helps them create a whole new version of iPhones that are NFL-specific, it’s more than carried its weight,” Berke said.

And Then There Were Three

Apple has re-established itself as the front-runner, according to some reports, but what appears to be holding up the deal are the equity stake in NFL Media and the ultimate price tag. While the NFL reportedly wants as much as $3 billion for the rights, pundits believe the deal will come in lower, perhaps in the $2 billion range.    

That’s still above the $1.5 billion annually DirecTV is paying, but may point to problems with the deal’s structure. According to CNBC,  sources familiar with the deal say that the NFL is requiring that whoever buys Sunday Ticket price it at or above its $300 to $400 yearly market value, mainly because of deals the NFL has with broadcasters CBS and Fox. So there will be no deep discounting of the service, something that DirecTV has done in the past to keep existing sub numbers up and attract new customers. Apple and Amazon also are said to be very interested in international streaming rights, something that Myers believes the NFL would like to sell separately. 

“I think the limitations that the NFL is trying to put on a deal will mean the deal comes in pretty far below what they are asking,” Myers said.

In the end, any deal will come down to who needs Sunday Ticket the most. And if scale still matters in the streaming business, that would seem to be Apple. ■

Amazon, Apple and The Walt Disney Co. are the final bidders for the NFL Sunday Ticket package, according to reports.

The league is seeking $2.5 billion to $3 billion for the package of out-of-market pro football games, according to Front Office Sports.

It is unclear whether any of the bidders are willing to pay that amount, which has led to a delay in the NFL awarding the package. Also complicating the issue is the league is looking to sell a stake in NFL Media, which includes NFL Network, NFL RedZone and NFL.com.

Two of the bidders, Disney, which has ESPN’s Monday Night Football, and Amazon, which this year starts a 10-year run as the exclusive national home of Thursday Night Football, are already paying $1 billion or more to the NFL.

Also: Apple May Bundle NFL Plus with NFL Sunday Ticket

DirecTV has had the rights to Sunday Ticket and paid $1.5 billion annually, drawing about 2 million subscribers each year. DirecTV required consumers to subscribe to DirecTV’s pay TV service in order to also subscribe to Sunday Ticket. That requirement began to break down in recent years, with some viewers in some ZIP codes able to order a streaming version of the package. In the new deal, no other subscription will be required to get Sunday Ticket, according to CNBC.

DirecTV might try to continue to maintain its Sunday Ticket subs as a subcontractor to whatever company wins the rights. It is not clear whether any of the current bidders for the package would be interested in that arrangement, CNBC said.

Also in the air is the commercial Sunday Ticket product, which DirecTV has sold to bars and restaurants.

Should the NFL not get what it considers a satisfactory bid, the league could also opt to put the out-of-market game on its own streaming service, called NFL Plus, which is expected to launch later this year. ■

Apple has long practiced a level of company secrecy, especially around product announcements, that’s uniquely stringent even in corporate tech circles. Which makes all the more intriguing the potential announcements at next Monday’s opening session of the company’s World Wide Developers Conference, often a bully platform for announcing its paradigm-shifting products to the people building software for them.

No, we probably won’t see the company’s long-in-development augmented-reality/virtual-reality headset or the related realityOS operating system for it, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a long history of accurately reading Apple tea leaves. Maybe there’ll be a new version of the MacBook Air laptop with a next-generation M2 processor.

Also read: Apple May Bundle NFL Plus with NFL Sunday Ticket

But the truly intriguing possibility has more to do with what Apple may announce, at WWDC or soon thereafter, with its streaming service, Apple TV Plus, and the NFL. 

Apple remains, by most recent reporting, the most likely future home for the NFL Sunday Ticket package of out-of-market games that limping satcaster DirecTV is giving up after this season, though Amazon is reportedly still very much in the hunt.

At the same time, the NFL is building its own streaming service, NFL Plus, which Sports Business Journal reported recently is expected to launch in July. 

As with the Sunday Ticket package, Apple and Amazon are the leading contenders to acquire rights to the service, which would feature live games on mobile phones and tablets, for $5 a month, plus whatever shoulder content such as radio, podcasts and team-created content are added in. 

Unlike Sunday Ticket, NFL Plus would only show the games someone could see in their home market. Previously, the material was available in a now-elapsed package with Yahoo and major wireless carriers.  

Perhaps more importantly, the league is considering selling a stake in NFL Media, where, again, Amazon and Apple are prime contenders. Both have the fat wallets and vast ambitions to do the deal, but I’m thinking the NFL may prefer to do a deal with Apple more than Amazon, if other deal points are relatively equal. 

Should Amazon pick up those two bits of NFL business, it would be easily the league’s most important partner. Amazon already is spending $1 billion annually for the next 11 years on Thursday night games. 

But all of that together would give Amazon outsized say over the league’s media future, while shutting out another rich and eager new partner just as all of the NFL’s older broadcast and cable distributors have seen audiences erode amid cord-cutting. 

Too much concentration is bad business, something the league is seldom accused of being about. Historically, the NFL has preferred to spread its media relationships around, much like the Defense Department with military contracts in every Congressional district, to ensure it always has competitive bids and political support for its valuable content, the most-watched programming on television. 

And Apple could definitely bring a lot to this team. 

It starts with an installed base of 1.8 billion devices, including hundreds of millions of iPhones, which make Apple the world’s most lucrative handset and tablet maker. 

The company is learning the ins and outs of streaming live sports, and targeted video advertising, with its Friday Night Baseball deal. Apple has declined so far to specify how many subscribers it has for Apple TV Plus, the service is on a roll in terms of quality programming, with lots more to come. 

Apple is expected to bump up content spending next year to more than $12 billion, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. That’s close to double the current level of $6 billion to $7 billion, and starts to create headaches for competitors trying to keep up in a tighter market. 

The NFL games (and tens of millions of viewers) would fit nicely next to the upcoming Martin Scorsese project, Killers of the Flower Moon, and whatever blockbuster content arrives by way of a deal with David Ellison’s Skydance Media (Top Gun: Maverick, multiple Mission: Impossible, Terminator,  and Jack Reacher entries). 

The NFL has been moving aggressively into new platforms for a while. It announced a developer contest last year with game platform Skillz to create NFL-branded football-connected mobile apps. Several finalists announced this March are headed to a bakeoff with a potential August launch ahead of the season. Winners will get a coveted league endorsement, branding and marketing support. 

And though Apple CEO Tim Cook has been even more secretive than usual when it comes to those Apple TV Plus subscriber counts (or indeed, the service’s basic strategy), an NFL partnership might arrive at a particularly propitious time for Apple. 

Over the past eight months, TV Plus projects have won a Best Comedy Emmy for Ted Lasso and a Best Picture Oscar for Coda. 

As this year’s Emmy FYC season kicks into high gear, newer shows Pachinko, from Korean-born auteur Kogonada, and Severance, produced and directed by Ben Stiller among others, are almost certainly in the mix. Schlub spy series Slow Horses, with Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, is also getting some critical love. 

The recent awards attention is an impressive validation of Apple TV Plus’ go-slow originals-only approach, which early on left its offerings woefully meager. At one point last year, I wrote that the bare cupboard made TV Plus look more like more like a corporate hobby than a truly competitive streaming service. 

Indeed, Apple seemed to agree. Even with TV Plus’ dirt-cheap price ($5.99 a month, or part of Apple’s various services bundles), Apple gave away subscriptions to just about anybody who would take one during TV Plus’ first 20 months or so of existence. 

Also read: Apple Makes History with Friday Night Baseball Debut

Now, it looks ready to spend as needed, part of Cook’s broader efforts to drive company growth through an ever beefier Services division, which generated $68 billion in fiscal year 2021. That was up a whopping 27 percent in a year. It’s also three times the market capitalizations of Paramount Global, which owns longtime NFL broadcaster CBS.  

The NFL, meanwhile, remains the biggest show on American television, however you define “TV.” How else to explain Fox’s $375 million announcer contract (the network has pushed back on the number, but whatever it is, it’s a lot) for still-not-retired quarterback Tom Brady and CBS’ $180 million/10-year deal with the already-retired Tony Romo? Just talking about the game is big business, because the game is massive business. 

Apple would need to figure out issues such as its own announcing teams, and likely further build out its advertising infrastructure. But it would have the Friday Night Baseball learnings, a year to get ready for Sunday Ticket, and the stake in NFL Media for master classes. If that all came together Apple would have bought into one of the world’s most successful TV production companies, which masquerades as a sports league. That would be a formidable new team indeed in the streaming wars. ■

Only 23 percent of DirecTV customers recently polled by S&P Kagan acknowledge paying for the satellite TV company's exclusively licensed NFL Sunday Ticket add-on package. 

The survey data, which was first published by paywalled news site Axios Tuesday, offers insight as to why DirecTV, which has licensed the Sunday Ticket out-of-market games package from the NFL since 1994 and currently pays $1 billion a season for it, will not seek to renew the agreement when it expires after this upcoming pro football season. 

It was reported late last month that Apple is close to licensing NFL Sunday Ticket, paying as much as $2.5 billion a year. 

According to the S&P Kagan data, 16% of DirecTV customers said they also subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, but get it free through promotional discounting. Seven percent said they were unsure if they had the add-on programming bundle. 

DirecTV was spun off from AT&T last year and had a reported 14.6 million remaining subscribers across its satellite- and IP-based services at the end of 2021. NFL Sunday Ticket pricing ranges from $293.96 to $395.99 for the "Max" plan, with customers able to sign up as the NFL regular season progresses at prorated cost.

Doing the basic math, if 23% of AT&T's base (around 3.35 million customers) pay $300, DirecTV is just about breaking even each season on its Sunday Ticket licensing. ■

Apple has already won the bidding to pay more than $2 billion a year for the "NFL Sunday Ticket" games bundle and will assume control of the out-of-market regular season games package when it breaks free from the only television distribution partner it has ever had, DirecTV, starting in the 2023 season.

Puck News reporter Matthew Belloni, citing unnamed sourcing, said a deal between Apple and the NFL has already been made, but Apple is holding off on making an announcement. (Editor's note: The widely consumed NFL Draft is set to begin on April 28.) 

It wouldn't be all that surprising for Apple to win the prized asset. In February, Sports Business News' John Ourand reported that the bidding would exceed $2 billion annually and was largely down to Apple and Amazon. 

Also read: Maybe That Apple TV Plus Idea Isn’t So Crazy After All

Apple hasn't commented publicly on this matter. 

NFL Sunday Ticket is an a la carte pay TV product that has been exclusively available on DirecTV since its launch in 1994. Subscribers pay from $290 - $400 a season to have Sunday access to every live NFL regular season game not being played in their local market. 

DirecTV has expressed an interest in keeping the venue rights to broadcast NFL Sunday Ticket in places like bars and restaurants. 

Apple, which has a market capitalization of $2.7 trillion, has been aggressive with sports rights, paying $55 million a year, and another $30 billion in an advertising split, to Major League Baseball for the rights to its brand new Friday Night Baseball franchise. 

Apple's early efforts with baseball -- its first live sports initiative for that matter -- has been dinged for some early bugs, but it's also been praised for some modern livening of baseball's somewhat staid offering.

At least one streaming industry pundit raised surprise that Apple trumped Amazon for Sunday Ticket rights. 

"I had always assumed Amazon was the most likely home for this package, given their deep pockets, the proven success of scale sporting events on the Amazon platform, a successful, multi-year proven track record with Thursday Night Football, the AWS advanced stats partnership, and finally, the tremendous e-commerce synergies," wrote Erik Opeka, chief strategy officer for Cinedigm, on LinkedIn Monday afternoon. ■

Amazon and Apple remain the leading bidders to take over as the exclusive platform provider for NFL Sunday Ticket, once DirecTV's current license for the out-of-market games package expires at the end of the 2022 NFL season.

Speaking to inside sources, Sports Business News' John Ourand reports that one of the two tech giants will pay more than $2 billion a season for NFL Sunday Ticket, well above the $1.4 billion being currently paid by DirecTV. 

Also according to Ourand's report, DirecTV may maintain piece of NFL Sunday Ticket as the exclusive out-of-home provider, where it can continue to offer the service to venues like restaurants and bars. 

Also read: DirecTV Mulls 'Co-Exclusive' Arrangement for NFL Sunday Ticket

Disney, meanwhile, hasn't ended its quest to obtain the asset for ESPN, but the report said Disney management is cool to spending the kind of money that it might take to get the package. 

Amazon has already begun ramping up its NFL broadcast infrastructure after agreeing to pay the NFL a reported $1 billion a year to take over as the exclusive broadcast partner of Thursday Night Football. 

It was reported Monday that Amazon is in talks with just-retired longtime New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton about becoming an oniair personality for Thursday Night Football. 

Will Tom Brady really retire? Where is Jimmy Garoppolo going? What's going to happen with NFL Sunday Ticket after next season?

Yes indeed, with the Super Bowl finally behind us and all NFL focus now directed to next season, the fate of the league's venerable -- and expensive -- out-of-market game rights package is a hot topic of discussion.

Also read: The NFL Quietly Takes 'Sunday Ticket' DTC and OTT

DirecTV's $1.5 billion-a-season rights deal for NFL Sunday Ticket expires after the upcoming 2022 season. DirecTV has been the exclusive home for the add-on live-sports package since its inception in the mid-1990s, and the broad assumption has been that the pay TV operator won't re-up for a new licensing deal, which could be as much as five times more expensive. 

The NFL has reportedly talked to Apple and Amazon, among other deeper-pocketed, more digitally driven companies about taking on NFL Sunday Ticket starting in 2023. But DirecTV might have a role in a more diversified future distribution paradigm for the package. 

Citing a source with "knowledge of the dynamics," NBC Sports reported that the league "will sell the whole package to a tech company" for a fee that could hit $7.5 million per season. 

NBC added that the NFL" may break off satellite rights to be sold only to consumers (typically, very rural) who lack access to the kind of Internet service needed for reliable streaming. That could be DirecTV, it could be Dish Network, it could be both, and it could be neither."

Meanwhile, speaking to CNET, DirecTV Chief Content Officer Rob Thun said he also can imagine a relationship whereby his satellite TV outfit shares NFL Sunday Ticket rights with a streaming provider. 

"I don't think [the NFL is] interested in an exclusive relationship beyond the term of our underlying deal," Thun said. "And what form the licensing takes with one partner or many is still undetermined, and we'll see how that plays out."

The league, Thun added, might be interested in a "co-exclusive" arrangement.

"They understand that the money still largely comes through the traditional TV bill, pay-TV doors, and they don't want to close the door on that entirely," Thun said.

It doesn't appear to be a error, after all--the NFL is indeed marketing a streaming version of its NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market games package, NFLSundayTicket.tv, to anyone and everyone, regardless as to whether they can subscribe to DirecTV satellite TV service or not. 

On Tuesday, Next TV received a second email promotion in the last two months from the NFL, inviting us to sign on to the streaming version of NFL Sunday Ticket for a prorated rate of $147 for the remainder of the 2021 NFL season. 

Even though we're non-DirecTV customers who live in a single-story Los Angeles duplex with a clear view of the southern sky, a residence that has successfully received DirecTV satellite service in the past, we were able to sign up and receive NFL Sunday Ticket live game streaming, a la carte and over the top, directly from the NFL, starting with Sunday's game slate. 

We received this same offer last month, and we were told by a DirecTV press rep that the marketing blast was the result of an "error," and that nothing had changed in regard to the distribution policy for SundayTicket.tv.

Just like last month's email, the most recent blast included the following disclaimer: "NFLSundayTicket.tv service is only available to non-DirecTV customers who live in select multi-dwelling unit buildings (apartments, condos, etc.) nationwide in the U.S. where DirecTV service is not available, live in select areas within various metropolitan cities, live in a residence that has been verified as unable to receive DirecTV satellite TV service due to obstructions blocking access to satellite signals, or are college students."

Our duplex is located in an area filled with multifamily housing and is positioned only three miles west of the University of Southern California campus. So yes, theoretically, the NFL--which lists its blast as being from "The NFL on Behalf of DirecTV"--could be off-target with its email marketing. (The blasts originate from "NFL@email.nfl.com.")

But once again, within the NFLSundayTicket.tv signup portal, we tested a number of addresses of friends and family members residing in suburban family homes, all fully able to receive DirecTV, and were given the green light for service each and every time. Supported devices for the NFLSundayTicket.tv app include Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Android TV, Apple TV, Samsung Fire TV, Xbox game and PlayStation game consoles, and iOS and Android mobile devices. 

How many folks are receiving these blasts? Tough to say. Journalist Phillip Swann, who covers the satellite TV business, said he's heard anecdotal reports from consumers who don't take DirecTV but can, who subscribe to NFLSundayTicket.tv.

He wrote about it as recently as September, but told us, "This has been going on for years."

UPDATED 11/17/2021: A Green Bay Packers fan now living in Minnesota said he tried signing up for Sunday Ticket, but was told no dice because his condo was eligible for satellite service. And another NFL fan said he was able to sign up for the streaming package at his address in tony Manhattan Beach, Calif., but unable to do so at his residence 70 miles north in Ojai, Calif. 

Swann said the NFL seems to be making Sunday Ticket available to non-DirecTV customers in select metropolitan areas. 

Meanwhile, a DirecTV rep emailed us early Wednesday evening with this statement: "Any assumption that we are not closely coordinated with the league on informing eligible consumers is false.

The rep added, "Your location likely is eligible because your zip code is, 'in select areas within various metropolitan cities' as outlined in the disclaimer of the communication."

So, our ability to sign up for the service wasn't an error all along?

Again, we tried five other zip codes across Southern California regions, ranging from affluent Orange County suburbs to rural San Bernardino desert communities. Each address was a single-family home that had satellite TV service in the past. 

The NFL, which has distributed Sunday Ticket through DirecTV since the package was developed in the mid-1990s, is reportedly eager to make it available in a direct-to-consumer, streaming format. Its multibillion contract with DirecTV doesn't expire until the end of the 2022 season, however. 

Could it be the league doesn't want to wait that long to go DTC and OTT? ■

Is the NFL quietly trying to expand NFL Sunday Ticket beyond the dwindling DirecTV subscriber base?

On Tuesday, the National Football League sent out an email blast, which it said was made "on behalf of DirecTV," inviting recipients to try the NFLSundayTicket.tv streaming service.

NFLSundayTicket.tv is a streaming service available only to select customers, such as college students living in dormitories and those living in multifamily dwellings without their own rooftops, who are unable to receive satellite TV. 

And the fine print at the bottom of the NFL's marketing email states: "NFLSundayTicket.tv service is only available to non-DirecTV customers who live in select multi-dwelling unit buildings (apartments, condos, etc.) nationwide in the U.S. where DirecTV service is not available, live in select areas within various metropolitan cities, live in a residence that has been verified as unable to receive DirecTV satellite TV service due to obstructions blocking access to satellite signals, or are college students." 

Also Read: Amazon Reportedly the Frontrunner to Poach 'NFL Sunday Ticket' From DirecTV

However, clicking through the email blast, and testing eligibility with our own address, as well as two other friends and family members living in Southern California, Next TV was able to sign up for both the $73.49-a-month SundayTicket.tv To Go and the $93.99-per-month SundayTicket.tv Max tier (which also includes NFL RedZone and NFL Fantasy Zone channels). All three addresses belonged to former DirecTV customers, meaning the residences don't have any issues with using satellite TV equipment. And the email address used by the league didn't match the one we used to correspond to DirecTV with when we had a subscription, which was canceled back in 2015.

According to a DirecTV rep, the email was an "error" made by the NFL, and NFLSundayTicket.tv remains only available to satellite-restricted users.

The NFL didn't immediately respond to our email inquiry.

Also read: Apple Declared the (Latest) Favorite in the ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ Sweepstakes

DirecTV pays the NFL around $1.5 billion per season to license the NFL Sunday Ticket games bundle, which provides subscribers willing to pay $395.99 for a full four-month season live TV access to every NFL regular season game being played outside their own market each Sunday. (The NFL's SundayTicket.tv blast appears to offer prorated rates covering the remainder of a season that's still in progress.)

DirecTV, which was recently spun off from AT&T to an entity partly owned by private equity firm TPG, has held the NFL Sunday Ticket license since the product launched in the mid-1990s. But the satellite TV operator doesn't appear interested in re-upping the pricey agreement, which expires after the next pro football season.

The NFL, meanwhile, has reportedly talked to Amazon and Apple about taking over the NFL Sunday Ticket license. The league is said to be particularly interested in expanding the property into video streaming. 

AT&T stopped breaking out individual metrics for DirecTV, but reported 15.4 million customers at the end of Q2 for its "premium TV" services, which include DirecTV, AT&T TV and AT&T U-verse. The three pay TV services collectively lost 473,000 customers in the second quarter. It's unclear how many of those remaining DirecTV customers take NFL Sunday Ticket. 

Beyond negotiating a new deal for the 2023 football season with a technology giant like Amazon or Apple, is the NFL content to sit on its hands the next season and a half, as DirecTV's linear audience dwindles away, exploiting only a tiny portion of the digital consumer base that's technically eligible to receive NFLSundayTicket.tv?

It is Apple and Amazon that is the true "favorite" in the bid to become the next home of NFL Sunday Ticket when the out-of-market games package becomes available after the 2022 pro football season, The Athletic reports.

Two weeks ago, it was reported that Amazon has the inside track to NFL Sunday Ticket, which has resided with DirecTV ever since the live games programming package first launched in the early 1990s. It's widely assumed that DirecTV, which was recently spun off from AT&T, will not renew its license for Sunday Ticket, for which it currently pays around $1.5 billion a season. 

Amazon, after all, just paid $1 billion to secure the rights to the NFL's Thursday Night Football franchise starting next season. The league also works with Amazon Web Services to provide stats, among many other entanglements. 

Citing unnamed sources close to the NFL, however, The Athletic has an allure for league officials in that its a pure-play technology company, marketing a consumer product, the iPhone, that's even bigger in the American consumer consciousness than football. 

Also Read: NFL Plans Monday Night Wild Card Playoff Game

Amazon, according to The Athletic’s narrative, is merely a “retailer.”

“So that diversifies the league — or the league’s always believed in an inclusive diversified kind of network mix,” said former Fox Sports executive turned consultant Patrick Crakes, to the subscription sports news site. “Apple is a different company than Amazon, even though people talk about them in the same breath. They’re very different. So I can see how the league might view that as a great diversification to their portfolio for the next decade.”

It's not the first time Apple's name has come up recently in the NFL Sunday Ticket discussion. In June, another paywalled insider news source, The Information, published a report indicating Apple's desire to pursue a license for the franchise. 

The Information based this take largely on the fact that Apple poached Amazon’s head of sports content, James DeLorenzo, last year. 

Of course, neither Amazon or Apple — or the NFL, for that matter — are commenting on any of these early reports. 

AT&T no longer owns DirecTV but it has agreed to pay up to $2.1 billion for losses resulting from its NFL Sunday Ticket contract.

Also Read: Amazon Reportedly the Frontrunner to Poach 'NFL Sunday Ticket' From DirecTV

AT&T agreed to spin off its pay TV businesses to TPG in a deal valued at $15 billion in February.  The deal closed in August.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, AT&T described how it was treating some aspects of the separation from a financial and accounting perspective.

It said that it was paying the new DirecTV up to a cap of $2.1 billion for losses resulting from the Sunday Ticket agreement. The rights deal expires at the end of the 2022 regular season.

DirecTV reportedly pays $1.5 billion a year for Sunday Ticket, which gives it a unique programming package that has made it a must-buy among hard-core football followers. The NFL this year reached new long-term deals for its other broadcast franchises, but it remains unclear where Sunday Ticket will end up after 2022.

AT&T also disclosed that its WarnerMedia division will continue to sell DirecTV’s advertising inventory until AT&T closes the sale of WarnerMedia to Discovery.

DirecTV will receive a 70% share of the revenue generated by selling the satellite-TV platform's advertising, according to the filing.

Apple has reportedly joined the growing group of broadcast and streaming companies looking to poach NFL Sunday Ticket when DirecTV’s contract with the pro football league runs out after the 2022 season. 

According to The Information, Apple is in “early talks” with the NFL about seizing the out-of-market regular season games package and putting it on Apple TV Plus. 

AT&T is in the process of spinning off DirecTV in a deal that will give private equity firm TPG 30% ownership of the satellite TV company. Neither AT&T or TPG have publicly forsaken the relationship with NFL Sunday Ticket, which provides a TV feed of every regular season game, save only for those being played in the subscriber’s home town. DirecTV has licensed NFL Sunday Ticket since its inception in 1994 and currently pays around $1.5 million a season to do so.

Still, other suitors are lining up—notably Amazon and The Walt Disney Company—to license the games package. This will add more TV money to the NFL’s coffers, following its flurry of 10-year deals in March that added up to a whopping $113 million. 

Based on Apple’s previous reluctance to sign huge program licensing deals for its streaming service—the company’s decision to pass on buying MGM comes to mind here—it would be easy to disregard Apple’s inclusion in the Sunday Ticket discussion. 

However, as The Information noted, Apple becomes a more relevant contender when you consider that it poached Amazon’s head of sports content, James DeLorenzo, last year. 

The Walt Disney Co., looking to beef up its ESPN Plus streaming service, is talking to the National Football League about its Sunday Ticket out-of-market game package, now with DirecTV.

On Disney’s earnings call Thursday, CEO Bob Chapek said Disney was considering and “in conversations about” acquiring rights to Sunday Ticket.

Also Read: Major League Baseball's Disney Deal Includes Streaming

“Obviously it’s an attractive property, but we’ll only do it, just like our other rights, if it is something that adds shareholder value.”

Disney is a long-time rights holder with the National Basketball Association. It recently signed a new deal to add National Hockey League games and renewed its agreement with the NFL. On the earnings call, Chapek announced a new deal with Major League Baseball and Spain’s La Liga soccer league. 

Also Read: Streamers Are Key to NHL Return to Disney

“Live sports are a very important component of our content business. And even amidst the challenges of the past year, we have continued to build our unrivalled portfolio in a disciplined way,” Chapek said.

“While our overall strategy is still very supportive of our linear business, given the important economic value for the company, we are also building out our ESPN Plus direct-to-consumer offering, he said. “And with every deal we make we are considering both the linear and DTC components.”

On the earnings call, one analyst asked Chapek if Disney had an appetite for more sports rights.

“We have a full house here,” Chapek said. “In terms of our appetite for going further, in terms of what’s really left, there’s not much.”

AT&T COO John Stankey told The Wall Street Journal that the telecom probably isn’t interested in renewing its contract to carry the “NFL Sunday Ticket” games package if the price tag exceeds the current eight-year, $12-billion level negotiated back in 2014.

“There’s less profitability to support the decision” to offer Sunday Ticket, Stankey told the paper. “It becomes less critical to the business over time.”

AT&T’s DirecTV satellite TV platform has exclusive rights to carry “Sunday Ticket,” a premium programming service that delivers every out-of-market NFL game on Sundays to subscribers.

The current agreement costs AT&T around $1.5 billion a season and runs through the 2022 season.

Related: Stankey Named AT&T Chief Operating Officer

The NFL is known to covet a video partner that will expand the realm of “Sunday Ticket” into streaming. And for his part, Stankey told WSJ that AT&T would be open to an arrangement that would let in other broadcast partners, so long as the loss of exclusivity would drive down the cost of the package.

“We’d always look at it,” Stankey said. “It all gets down to what the price of something is.”

Will the NFL pull out early from its agreement with DirecTV to carry its NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market games package? And will it break off streaming rights from this satellite deal and sell them to another technology company besides DirecTV parent AT&T?

In what is being billed as a wide-ranging Q&A with Sports Business Daily writer Ben Fischer, which is set to publish on Sept. 2, National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell doesn't seem to be making any declarative statements.

As it happens, Fischer’s colleague, SBJ media editor John Ourand, released some of Goodell’s quotes early in a Wednesday blog post. Are a few tea leaves to read between in here?

Some background: The NFL can opt out of the last two seasons of its DirecTV satellite-TV deal, 2021 and 2022, sacrificing $3 billion in hopes that it can do better elsewhere. Simultaneously, it has reportedly talked to other streaming companies beyond AT&T about breaking off NFL Sunday Ticket streaming rights. The league is said to have talked to ESPN+, DAZN and Amazon, but no deal is imminent.

In his SBJ discussion, Goodell seems to indicate that AT&T has an inside track to keeping it all in the corporate family. Since taking over DirecTV in 2015, AT&T has launched virtual multichannel video programming distributor AT&T TV Now and premium streaming pay-TV platform AT&T TV.

“Obviously AT&T-DirecTV is a different company than when we struck the deal,” Goodell told Fischer. “They have more platforms, they have more assets. The deal we have structured is a satellite-only deal, and so we’ll continue to talk to them about whether that’s made available to a broader audience through other platforms — either through AT&T or otherwise, but those are things that we’ll continue to have discussions about. But I expect to be partners with them for the next several years at least.”

Could “next several years” also mean the NFL is playing out the string, and will leave after the 2020 season? Goodell also expressed comfort in working with companies like Amazon and Google.

“These are really very sophisticated companies,” he told SBJ. “They are making huge investments into video. I firmly believe, and I hear this more consistently, that live sports can make a difference in a lot of those platforms. I do firmly believe that these other platforms are going to be players in future negotiations. And frankly, they are in current negotiations.”

AT&T and the NFL have missed deadlines to opt out of their current deal for DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket and will keep the live games package exclusively on the satellite TV carrier through the 2020-21 pro football season, The Athletic reports (behind the site's paywall).

AT&T and the National Football League are widely known to be at an impasse to extend their eight-year, $12 billion deal for Sunday Ticket, which was signed in 2014. Each had the option of opting out of that deal before it expired. But the sports news site said both parties missed the deadline to press the eject button.

For now, both the football league and the wireless giant have agreed to continue talking under a “gentleman’s agreement.”

The Athletic report conflicts with an earlier Sports Business Journal story suggesting that both sides had until the end of the 2019-20 season to opt out of the contract.

AT&T ‘paralyzed?’

With the NFL recouping $1.5 billion a year, an unnamed source The Athletic identified as being affiliated with National Football League team ownership described the league as being in no hurry to opt out of the current arrangement.

“The NFL is going to be in a good position,” the league source told The Athletic. “I mean, I don’t mean that to sound obnoxious. But I mean, they’re gonna pay us a lot of money, or there are others with different business models lined up to pay us different money for different versions of it. . . . I think the NFL will be fine. I think AT&T is paralyzed.”

Related: AT&T Gives Up on DirecTV Brand in Latest Streaming Ventures

Certainly, the pricey NFL Sunday Ticket contract is coming up at an inopportune time for AT&T, which appears to be de-prioritizing the satellite TV company it paid $67.1 billion for just four years ago.

As MCN noted earlier this week, AT&T is no longer using the DirecTV brand for its emerging streaming ventures. And the one asset it did use the brand for, virtual pay TV service DirecTV Now, appears poised for marginalization.

With DirecTV losing more than 1 million linear satellite TV customers in 2018, speculation has begun to swirl that AT&T might sell the asset to Dish Network, which is watching its own satellite TV service decline at a similar rate.

The satellite TV carriers tried to merge back in 2002, but were rebuffed by regulators. This time around, the conventional wisdom among equity analysts is that the platforms are too obsolete, and face too much OTT competition, to say no to.

In any event, as AT&T weighs the mathematics of a satellite TV platform that appears no longer useful to it, a rash decision to ditch one of its crown jewels, Sunday Ticket, does not appear in the offing. 

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson expressed confidence that a renewal deal will be carved out with the National Football League to keep NFL Sunday Ticket on the DirecTV satellite TV platform when the current agreement expires after this upcoming season.

“We're not allowed to discuss much, but the exclusivity should remain as we go forward on DirecTV,” Stephenson told investment analysts during Wednesday’s AT&T first quarter earnings call.

Related: DirecTV Now Drops NFL Network

Stephenson described DirecTV as “highly invested” in the NFL, a $294-a-season games package which he believes appeals to the satellite platform’s “high-end” customers. Given AT&T’s heavy losses of 544,000 customers on the linear TV side in the first quarter, it’s tough to imagine the company ditching popular exclusive franchises right now.

But with the NFL also reportedly shopping for a streaming window for NFL Sunday Ticket, Stephenson said nothing about the franchise coming to virtual pay TV platform DirecTV Now, or AT&T’s “thin-client” streaming replacement service for the full DirecTV satellite bundle, set to launch later this year.

Stephenson did, however, address the issue of the NFL Network recently being pulled from AT&T U-verse TV and DirecTV Now.

“When you look at the NFL Network, there's some costs attached to that,” he said. “Our customers can watch the NFL Draft on ABC, and they can watch the Thursday night games on Fox. It just didn’t really make sense to continue carrying it over there. So it will save some content cost and we will give our customers access to the NFL through other mediums. If they really are a NFL centric customer, we will move them to DirecTV.

AT&T chief financial officer John Stephens said after two consecutive quarters of negative video customer growth, the telecom company should finish the year in the black, fueled in part by subscriber gains from its DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket out-of-market football package.

At the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media, Communications and Entertainment conference Wednesday, Stephens said that after second quarter losses of about 49,000 video customers, AT&T was on a path toward positive growth.

AT&T has two video services – the wireline U-verse TV and the satellite delivered DirecTV. Over the past two quarters AT&T has been migrating U-verse customers to its DirecTV platform. While DirecTV has had robust growth over the quarterly periods – it added 328,000 and 342,000 net new subscribers in the first and second quarters respectively – it hasn’t been enough to fully offset heavy losses at U-verse.

At the conference, Stephens said AT&T expected its subscriber growth to be skewed more toward the second half of the year, when Sunday Ticket is in full swing. But he said that isn’t the only factor in video growth.

“[I]t's because of the NFL [Sunday] Ticket coming out, it's because we are going to get better, our installation guys are going to get better with single truck rolls, it is because our sales teams and our call centers and our customer care centers were all going to get better more efficient, more used to cross selling the products because many of the folks in those organizations and the systems in those organizations were built to cross sell both video and broadband,” Stephens said. “So we are continuing to work on that, we haven't changed that goal and that guidance and we continue to work really hard to achieve it.”

DirecTV is hoping to better reach gridiron fans everywhere they watch video through an enhanced streaming “NFL Sunday Ticket” out-of-market package.

This year’s improvements to Sunday Ticket — including, for the first time, full digital streaming access to every game as part of the $269 base subscription — is a nod to fans’ increased interest in watching games on their mobile devices. (In previous years, DirecTV charged an additional $90 fee to stream games.)

“We think, based on the trends and where everything is headed, giving our customers the option of watching games on TV and then a second game on a phone or a tablet or computer is really a great service to our customers,” Robert Stecklow, DirecTV general manager of sports and sponsorships, told Multichannel News.

Also, after offering its $99 NFL Sunday Ticket streaming-only service to college student at select universities, DirecTV this season will offer virtually all college students attending two-year and four-year colleges access to the package, said Stecklow.

More than half of NFL Sunday Ticket new subscriber sales are to college students, he said, and DirecTV launched targeted social media ads focused on reaching college students on numerous campuses.

This season, the online streaming package can be accessed on the new generation of Apple TV devices, as well as Amazon’s Fire Stick media player. The service is already available on such video-streaming devices as Google’s Chromecast, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

DirecTV has also enhanced its NFL Sunday Ticket mobile app by providing full screen access to games upon the app’s opening. Tablet users will also have access to picture-in-picture mode, Stecklow said, allowing them to watch a game while accessing other services.

“We’re always looking to perfect and refine what we believe to be the best sports subscription product out there,” Stecklow said.

Streaming usage for the NFL Sunday Ticket package has grown year to year, though most satellite customers still prefer to watch games on their big-screen TVs, he said.

“We know a lot of people can’t be home when the games are taking place, so there is a good use case for it and we’ve seen more and more of our customers adopting that behavior,” Stecklow said.

Despite the heavy focus on streaming, Stecklow he doesn’t believe the NFL Sunday Ticket package will become a predominately Internet-based product in the near future. The streaming service is intended for consumers who can’t put up a satellite dish to subscribe to DirecTV.

“I think they will both coexist,” he said. “Our satellite customers are by far the biggest customers who access the content, and viewing on TV is still by far the No. 1 way they do it.”

Still, more live NFL games will be available via digital and streaming this year than in years past. Social-media platform Twitter will stream 10 Thursday Night Football games alongside NFL Network, CBS and NBC. That’s in addition to live streaming of NBC’s Sunday Night Football games and ESPN Monday Night Football telecasts available via WatchESPN.

Verizon Wireless customers will also have access to weekly local live NFL games as part of their cellular plan.

Are You Ready for Some Football?

Cable viewers can catch primetime NFL action on Mondays and Thursdays this season:

ESPN ‘Monday Night Football’ Schedule
Date                                 Game
Sept. 12 . . . Pittsburgh Steelers at Washington Redskins
                     Los Angeles Rams at San Francisco 49ers
Sept. 19 . . . . . .  Philadelphia Eagles at Chicago Bears
Sept. 26 . . . . .   Atlanta Falcons at New Orleans Saints
Oct. 3 . . . . . . .  New York Giants at Minnesota Vikings
Oct. 10 . . . . Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Carolina Panthers
Oct. 17 . . . . . . . . New York Jets at Arizona Cardinals
Oct. 24 . . . . . . . . Houston Texans at Denver Broncos
Oct. 31 . . . . . . .  Minnesota Vikings at Chicago Bears
Nov. 7 . . . . . . . . . . Buffalo Bills at Seattle Seahawks
Nov. 14 . . . . . .  Cincinnati Bengals at New York Giants
Nov. 21 . . . . . . . .Houston Texans at Oakland Raiders
Nov. 28 . . . . . Green Bay Packers at Philadelphia Eagles
Dec. 5 . . . . . . . . . Indianapolis Colts at New York Jets
Dec. 12 . . . . .Baltimore Ravens at New England Patriots
Dec. 19 . . . . .Carolina Panthers at Washington Redskins
Dec. 26 . . . . . . . . Detroit Lions at Dallas Cowboys

NFL Network ‘Thursday Night Football’ Schedule
Date                           Game                                                          Other distribution outlets
Sept. 15 . . . . . . . . . New York Jets at Buffalo Bills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CBS, Twitter
Sept. 22 . . . .  Houston Texans at New England Patriots . . . . . . . . .CBS, Twitter
Sept. 29 . . . . . . Miami Dolphins at Cincinnati Bengals
Oct. 6 . . . . . .  Arizona Cardinals at San Francisco 49ers . . . . . . . . . CBS, Twitter
Oct. 13 . . . . . .  Denver Broncos at San Diego Chargers . . . . . . . . . . CBS, Twitter
Oct. 20 . . . . . . .  Chicago Bears at Green Bay Packers . . . . . . . . . . CBS, Twitter
Oct. 27 . . . . .  Jacksonville Jaguars at Tennessee Titans
Nov. 3 . . . . . . Atlanta Falcons at Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Nov. 10 . . . . . .  Cleveland Browns at Baltimore Ravens
Nov. 17 . . . . .  New Orleans Saints at Carolina Panthers . . . . . . . . .NBC, Twitter
Dec. 1 . . . . . . . .Dallas Cowboys at Minnesota Vikings . . . . . . . . . . NBC, Twitter
Dec. 8 . . . . . . . Oakland Raiders at Kansas City Chiefs . . . . . . . . . .NBC, Twitter
Dec. 15 . . . . . . Los Angeles Rams at Seattle Seahawks . . . . . . . . . NBC, Twitter
Dec. 17 . . . .  Miami Dolphins at New York Jets (Saturday)
Dec. 22 . . . . . . New York Giants at Philadelphia Eagles . . . . . . . . . . NBC, Twitter
Dec. 24 . . Cincinnati Bengals at Houston Texans (Saturday)

SOURCES: ESPN, NFL Network

DirecTV has expanded its NFL Sunday Ticket streaming package for college students to 2- and 4-year institutions, as well as making the service available on more devices like Apple TV.

For the first time, DirecTV said students at 2-and 4-year colleges can stream out of market NFL games via NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV U, for $24.99 per month for four months.

University students were the heaviest users of the streaming service last year, according to DirecTV parent AT&T. More than a third of all subscribers were students.

 “University students are often far from home and unable to watch their favorite hometown NFL teams,” said AT&T Entertainment Group chief marketing officer David Christopher in a statement. “With NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV U, we’re connecting them to their home and team.”

 DirecTV will continue to offer NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV and NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV MAX to residents who live in apartments, condos or townhomes in the U.S. where DirecTV service is not available.

 Nearly anyone living in a single family home that can’t connect to a DirecTV satellite is also eligible for the streaming service, which then allows customers to stream every live, out-of-market regular season NFL game, every Sunday afternoon, virtually anywhere they are.

NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV U and NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV MAX includes access to the Red Zone Channel and DirecTV Fantasy Zone Channel.

The streaming service is now available on Apple TV (4th generation tvOS version only) this season for all NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV subscribers in addition to its continued availability on Xbox One and 360, PlayStation 3 and 4, and Chromecast. NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV starts at $49.99/month for 4 months.  

Live NFL SUNDAY TICKET games start Sunday, Sept. 11, at 1 p.m. ET.  Games on Saturday, Dec. 24, will be included in NFLSUNDAYTICKET.TV.

Beginning with the upcoming National Football League season, DirecTV customers that purchase the exclusive out-of-market NFL Sunday Ticket package will be able to live stream every regular season game on any device without having to upgrade to a more expensive service, the company said Thursday.

In the past, the live streaming option was only available to Sunday Ticket Max customers, who paid an additional charge for the privilege.

The basic Sunday Ticket package is generally priced around $250 (6 monthly payments of $41.99) while Sunday Ticket Max costs about $350 (6 monthly payments of $58.99).

"Streaming of NFL Sunday Ticket exploded last year— up 35%. This further proves customers want to watch their favorite team wherever they are,” said AT&T Entertainment Group chief marketing officer David Christopher in a statement. “That will grow more this year, now that every customer can enjoy live games on a second screen or on-the-go without having to pay more.”

AT&T is banking the Sunday Ticket offering will help boost its TV subscriber rolls and chief financial officer John Stephens recently said the package, along with wireless bundles and other products should help drive postive overall video customer growth by the end of the year.

The basic NFL Sunday Ticket package will continue to deliver every regular season game live every Sunday afternoon on satellite TV, and includes Game Mix channels, which feature up to 8 live games on one screen. Fans also can track scores, stats and standings on their TV and follow players and team stats on Player Tracker.

NFL Sunday Ticket Max includes the regular package features and premium services like the popular Red Zone Channel and the exclusive DirecTV Fantasy Zone Channel.  These services are available on TV and for streaming. Short Cuts is a streaming-only feature that has replays of full games, each in less than 30 minutes.

Live games on NFL Sunday Ticket start Sunday, Sept. 11, 2016.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide has named DirecTV its preferred video and audio provider in the U.S, providing in-room access to the satellite giant’s popular NFL Sunday Ticket, programming for the four major professional sports leagues and nearly 100 HD channels.

 Beginning today, Sheraton, one of Starwood’s 10 hotel brands, will upgrade its HDTV capability and bring new channels to its U.S. hotels as part of its Sheraton 2020 initiative to make Sheraton the global hotel brand of choice.

“Sheraton is taking the lead in dramatically evolving on-property entertainment options to provide guests with an effortless travel experience, allowing them to truly feel as though our hotels are their home away from home,” said Sheraton Hotel & Resorts global brand leader Dave Marr in a statement. “Now our guests don’t have to miss their favorite shows while staying with us.”

This is the second major hotel deal DirecTV has inked in about a year. Back in April 2014 the satellite giant announced a deal to provide advanced TV services to Hilton Hotels. 

Starwood properties will have access to DirecTV’s 2nd generation headend platform and DirecTV Residential Experience (DRE). Hotel guests at properties providing DRE will benefit from access to nearly 100 HD channels, exclusive sports programing, a user-friendly interactive program guide and select DVR capabilities. 

“Our work with Starwood will open up more TV channel options for hotels, improving the in-room entertainment experience for guests,” said AT&T GigaPower, Commercial and Connected Communities senior vice president Eric Boyer in a statement. “We’re providing properties and their guests with the best programming options available in the U.S.”

These and other new offerings will be available to current and future guests of Starwood properties subscribing to DirecTV services through any of DirecTV’s authorized hospitality dealers.

Starwood has 1,200 properties in about 100 countries and its brands include St. Regis, The Luxury Collection, W, Westin, Le Meridien, Sheraton, Four Points by Sheraton, Aloft, Element and Tribute Portfolio.