NFL Sunday Ticket Is Reportedly Leaving DirecTV And Heading To YouTube For About $2.5 BILLION
SOURCE - Google and its affiliated YouTube TV are emerging as the leading contenders to land the package of every NFL game, The Post has learned. An announcement could come as soon as Wednesday.
Apple was for a long stretch considered the frontrunner to land the package, but talks between Apple and the NFL broke down last week, according to a report from Puck.
This is great news for anyone living in an apartment or simply tried to watch Sunday Ticket during a rainy day. This is also a major shift for the NFL. They have been having Sunday Ticket on DirecTV since 1994 and currently pay the NFL $1.5 billion dollars a year. They are about to get a lot more.
The NFL and MLB have done a great job extracting a ton of money from these streaming companies like Apple+, Amazon and now YouTube/Google. They pretend that they are fearful of going away from cable and use that as leverage to get almost twice as much money. Meanwhile, they don't actually give a shit if the games were on NBC or YouTube. You think if MLB cared, they would have a blackout map that looked like this?
All that being said, I think this Sunday Ticket move is a great thing for fans. It's so much less commitment to have something on YouTube as opposed to the giant pain in the ass that is DirecTV. This will make Sunday Ticket so much more accessible for people living in cities or who don't want to sign a contract and deal with having an ugly satellite dish attached to their house.
The only negative I can see is that it could be a pain in the ass to switch out of YouTube and watch something else like during the MLB playoffs. But other than that, I don't see too many negatives for fans. With MLB and the Apple+ deal, I did think that might be kind of shitty for elderly fans who just want to watch their team and don't know the fuck about streaming. But are elderly fans watching Sunday Ticket? It's only been around since 1994 and if you have the ability to deal with DirecTV, I'm guessing you can wrap your head around YouTube.