YouTube’s Sunday Ticket Structure A Touchdown… For YouTube
About a month before from the release of the 2023-24 NFL regular season schedule, fans now know how much they’ll pay to watch the games.
On Tuesday, YouTube announced a variety of price points for customers that looks steep on paper, but is mostly a savvy scheme devised to boost YouTube TV sign-ups. See below for the quick-hit graphic from Yahoo Finance:
While that price tag seems steep, keep in mind that NFL Sunday Ticket cost nearly $294 per season for the basic plan with DIRECTV, and an extra $102 per season for the premium plan that included both the Red Zone Channel and Fantasy Zone network.
For consumers that also subscribe to YouTube TV, the base option here is actually cheaper than it was last year — until June 6, anyway. For the Red Zone bundle, fans will pay about $6 less, again if they’re YouTube TV subscribers and sign up by June 6.
If you really want Sunday Ticket, you’re going to pay for it, whatever the price. Realistically, this is just like any other late-adopter tax, and that’s where YouTube really makes money here. Additionally, they’ll make a ton on new YouTube TV subscriptions. So even where it’s “cheaper” for consumers if they sign up with YouTube TV by June 6, YouTube is still making $63 per month on top of that for the first 10 months, then $73 per month after if they retain those subscribers.
This will be especially enticing for DirecTV Stream and Fubo audiences, who are now being given a better competitive option to subscribe to YouTube TV and get the Sunday Ticket service they were potentially subscribed to those services for (Fubo had RedZone).
For those that are already YouTube TV subscribers, this is less about incremental income on top of Sunday Ticket, and more about retention. Sure, plenty of existing YouTube TV subscribers won’t care about Sunday Ticket. But plenty will, and now you’re giving them another clear reason to stick with you — while also making additional money off them you didn’t previously.
YouTube also creates the additional option for non-subscribers to watch, but creates a “penalty” there as well that can cause behavioral adjustments over time when it comes to subscriptions, price or both.
The bigger test for YouTube could be on the streaming latency front, which has long been a major concern for sports fans ditching linear (raises hand) and is far from resolved. As Phenix data from the Super Bowl shows, YouTube still lagged by nearly 55 seconds during that event.
Given how many TV viewers — sports fans and otherwise — are flocking to streaming in recent years, perhaps those seconds aren’t the end-all, be-all, though. And without alternatives for YouTube TV’s Sunday Ticket package, what else are fans going to do if they want to watch out-of-town games? The only option now is to head to bars and restaurants, where all games will potentially still be available through linear tV (sold through a separate package).
So are consumers really getting disadvantaged here? It would seem no, as long as they’re willing to either stay with YouTube TV or switch over. That’s no different from the setup DIRECTV once had over the TV ecosystem, and having that contract was one of the main reasons it was originally purchased by AT&T. It’s a Trojan Horse for streaming, much the way DIRECTV was for satellite.
YouTube TV being a streaming service may make for some hesitancy for some consumers to change, too. But like Amazon did with Thursday Night Football, this is yet another test around how much the NFL can push people into new (for them) streaming environments.
