The NFL’s decision to move its out-of-market games package Sunday Ticket to streamer YouTube TV is paying off with subscriptions at their highest level in five years, NFL chief business and media officer Brian Rolapp told the media at the league’s Fall meeting in New York.
DirecTV held the package from the inaugural season in 1994 to early 2023, and in its final year is believed to have had about one million subs. Sunday Ticket’s pairing with a satellite TV company always limited the reach of the package, though there was some digital distribution to homes without satellite dish access.
“We are already above where it was last year, we are the highest, we’re not releasing the number, we’re the highest subscription I think we’ve seen in five years,” Rolapp said. “So it’s been really successful. So when you measure by subscribers, but probably not more importantly, the fan reaction is great. So we were really happy.”
Bloomberg reported recently that YouTube had sold 1.3 million Sunday Tickets subs. Sunday Ticket costs between $349 a year to $489 depending on the package. It can be purchased on YouTube TV or at YouTube Primetime Channels.
Google’s YouTube is paying roughly $2 billion annually over 10 years for the Sunday Ticket rights. DirecTV was paying $1.5 billion on average annually in the last eight years of its run.
Rolapp pointed to the multi-view on YouTube TV’s presentation as a feature the NFL is getting positive fan feedback. Multiview allows viewers to watch four games at once.
Rolapp, one of the top executives at the NFL, had nothing but rosy news to deliver (surprise, surprise). Through six weeks, average ratings are up 4 percent to 17.3 million viewers (excluding international), he said, while Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime continues to set streaming records for American viewership.
“Amazon, which we’ve seen so far, just short of 14 million viewers, is starting to look closer to broadcast numbers,” Rolapp said. “The digital business is starting to catch up, it hasn’t quite caught up but it has been significant growth.”
Rolapp attributes the rise in part to more fan awareness of where the TNF games reside.
“So the first focus was awareness, let people know where to get it, how to get it,” Rolapp said. “And Amazon does a fabulous job promoting that it was hard to go anywhere in the football world and not hear about it. So I think the promotion really helped. I also think it’s not a mystery why we chose Amazon for this package. Everyone here has some interaction with Amazon. So the reach of that platform is gigantic.”
Rolapp also emphasized what the league calls non-live shows, such as Quarterback on Netflix, which followed three QBs through the 2022 season, and Kelce on Amazon Prime, a film about Travis and Jason Kelce.
“So a great year NFL Films is having, it’s been sort of an unprecedented year for NFL Films,” Rolapp said. “We had the number one series on Netflix for eight days for Quarterback, it was in the top 10 in 16 countries around the world in July. It’s the first time we’ve had that type of impact. The number one show on Roku. Hard Knocks and the Jets was one of the highest-viewed Hard Knocks we’ve ever had. Amazon, the Kelce film, that film…was the number one movie series on Amazon Prime for a very long time. I like to think that’s all football…So we’ve talked a lot about our efforts in the future, how that is the key of engaging our fans, but also globally, where we can use these streaming platforms.”
Questioned about the recent reluctance of players to participate in Quarterback (and the Jets were dragged kicking and screaming to Hard Knocks), Rolapp is convinced it will work out.
“We are encouraging it, the access shows, particularly those that require a bit of a commitment from the football staff to participate,” said Rolapp. “We know they’re singularly focused on their job, which is to win football games. So it’s an ongoing discussion. We find, I’ve been doing this a long time and I know not every person I talked to has been on the football side, they don’t want to do it. They do it. They always say it wasn’t as bad as they thought. And there’s clearly a bunch of benefit that accrues to the franchise or to the league, players, and coaches themselves.”
On the NFL’s long-running search for an NFL Media equity partner–not to mention ESPN’s own search for an equity investor, which the NFL is seen as a possibility–Rolapp said he has nothing to report other than that there are a lot of discussions.
Looking forward, there is at least one hiccup on the horizon, Rolapp does see a reduction in ratings next season. Speaking after his media briefing exclusively to Awful Announcing, Rolapp said every presidential election year since 1996 ratings have declined. And since 2016, Donald Trump’s campaigns spiked cable news ratings, and for now, it appears he will be running again next year.
“Maybe with how fragmented pay TV is now, maybe that would dampen,” he said. “I don’t know. …we also don’t obsess about it because it’s all about right, so it’s almost like a stock kind of as this seems to be headed in the right direction. That’s kind of how we look at it.”
