A report from The New York Times this weekend said YouTube is the latest contender for the NFL’s flagship content package, the NFL Sunday Ticket. There is still no winner in the bidding process, but Google’s video division is battling Apple, which the Times says is “deemed to be the front runner”in the deal. The winning bid is expected to reach $2.5 billion per season.
The NFL Sunday Ticket offers all regular season off-market Sunday afternoon games as a giant cable package costing ~$300/year. Nationally televised games and your local games are not included in the package, but that’s everything else you won’t normally be able to watch – about 13 extra games a week. In the US, the service was (mostly) exclusive to satellite television provider DirecTV for many years, with the most recent deal signed in 2014 for $1.5 billion a year. The current DirecTV deal is expiring at the end of this upcoming season, and with TV subscriptions plummeting, the beleaguered DirecTV no longer has the cash to renew its relationship with the NFL. This means the Sunday Ticket will be the next big chess piece in The Streaming Wars.
While the production of Amazon’s Thursday Night Football involved building a football operation from scratch, which puts it on par with FOX, CBS, NBC and ESPN, Ticket Sunday requires far less production work. The winning company will only have to simulcast existing local TV programming from across the US.
The report lists Apple, Amazon, ESPN+ (Disney) and YouTube (Google) as major players in the deal. The Times reports that “the final deal has been delayed due to negotiations to simultaneously sell NFL media assets, including the NFL Network, RedZone Channel and NFL+.”The League has many small packages to share in the era of streaming.
Brian Rollapp, the NFL’s director of communications and business, told The New York Times: “A number of companies are in a strong position to potentially win the Sunday Ticket, but we still have ways to move forward in the process.”
The report says that Apple has made getting the package a “priority,”but it’s not clear if Google is really keen to win it or just wants to raise the price. We often see Google participate in Big Tech auctions but rarely close deals. The company made a lot of noise about participating in the FCC 700 MHz Block C auction in 2008, but mostly bluffing the auction to get the price to the “open listing”threshold. Google didn’t win a $4.5 billion auction for Nortel’s patents in 2011 and failed to close a deal during the 2013 Facebook war.
On the other hand, YouTube is facing huge competition from the new video platform TikTok. While TikTok is popular with the youth, the NFL package could bring it a ton of viewership in the older demographic.