Eight weeks into the 2023 NFL season, YouTube experienced its first hiccup with NFL Sunday Ticket.
During the 1 p.m. ET window in Week 8, many users were plagued with buffering issues. Heading into Week 9, YouTube says that the problems have been “completely mitigated.”
At the SBJ Media Innovators conference, YouTube Global Head of Media and Sports Partnerships Lori Conkling said users should be confident in NFL Sunday Ticket this weekend.
YouTube fixed the technical problems that plagued “NFL Sunday Ticket” during the busy 1pm window last Sunday, Global Head of Media and Sports Partnerships Lori Conkling told me today. “It’s completely mitigated,” she said onstage at the SBJ Media Innovators conference in New York.
“People can have confidence in this Sunday, but it is top of mind for us that we are responsible for delivering the exceptional experience that we have promised to our viewers. So we take that very seriously, and we have done everything possible to ensure it does not happen again.” I asked if she was confident that it wouldn’t. “We are,” she said.
The company did not answer questions about potential rebates for subscribers. DirecTV occasionally refunded customers when it had NFL Sunday Ticket issues, including in Week 2 last season. Also in 2022, a host of streaming products, including Sunday Ticket, were impacted by issues in Week 1.
While the issues in Week 8 were unfortunate, YouTube was arguably facing its biggest challenge of the 2023 NFL season to date. Fox drew the league’s most-watched singleheader window of the season and CBS had a strong doubleheader, with a whopping nine games airing between the two networks in the 1 p.m. ET window.
The teams airing in that window included Pittsburgh, both New York teams, Miami, New England, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Green Bay — a pretty loaded slate of some of the league’s most popular teams. Only two of those teams air in the 1 p.m. ET window in Week 9 and with just seven games in the early slate combined with the updates made by YouTube, it’ll probably be a much smoother experience for fans this Sunday.
