NFL Sunday Ticket Will Have Many New Features When It Moves To YouTube This Fall, Google Exec Philipp Schindler Says
NFL Sunday Ticket, a stronghold of football fandom in the U.S. since 1994, will be getting an array of digital enhancements when it shifts to YouTube this fall from its longtime home on DirecTV.
“We think there are a lot of great opportunities to differentiate the user and creator experience with our unique capabilities,” Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler told Wall Street analysts during parent company Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday. “Every YouTube viewer who’s interested in the NFL can now have one-click access to the full offering of Sunday Ticket. This will be the first time that Sunday Ticket is available à la carte for fans.”
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Schindler indicated that picture-in-picture functionality enabling viewers to surf around games of their choice is in the works along with features like chatting.
Google is paying a reported $2 billion a year for the package of daytime games. The tech company hasn’t disclosed pricing or other details yet, but plans to offer it both as an add-on for the 5 million-plus subscribers to pay bundle YouTube TV or as a separate option via the company’s channel store. The football talk was timely given the buildup to the February 12 Super Bowl and also served as a welcome distraction for execs after Google and YouTube parent Alphabet reported another soft quarter. YouTube posted an 8% year-to-year drop in ad revenue during the period.
Many longtime subscribers to Sunday Ticket, which was once a valuable driver of satellite subscriptions for DirecTV but has languished recently, have rooted for tech upgrades as the NFL hashed out a deal with a streaming partner. DirecTV, which is now privately owned by AT&T and private equity firm TPG, also suffered embarrassing tech outages last season. League commissioner Roger Goodell in the summer of 2022 indicated Sunday Ticket would head to streaming in a deal originally intended as a fall announcement, but negotiations with Apple and other bidders proved complex. YouTube ultimately prevailed last December.
Schindler teased a range of updates to the offering, without getting into specifics.
“On YouTube TV, we’re building the ability for subscribers to, for example, watch multiple screens at once and on YouTube [connected TV] we’ll be adding new features specific to the Sunday Ticket experience, like comments, chats, polls, and so on,” he said. “On the creator side, imagine all the creative ways they can create with exclusive NFL content, behind-the-scenes event access and so on. We’re really excited to see what they will do across long-form, short form, livestreams and more.”
The YouTube deal further extends the reach of the NFL into streaming. Last fall, the league kicked off an 11-year exclusive relationship with Amazon for Thursday Night Football on Prime Video. Media partners NBCUniversal, Disney and Paramount have all started to phase in exclusive streaming broadcasts on their respective digital platforms.
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