Peter King didn’t mince words when reacting to a quote from a YouTube executive about NFL Sunday Ticket.
Starting with the 2023 NFL season, NFL Sunday Ticket moved from DirecTV to YouTube TV. Over the past week, YouTube TV released more details about the service, including pricing. One feature not yet available on Sunday Ticket is the option to subscribe to a single team at a discount.
In recent years, the NBA, MLB, and NHL have options where you could have access to a single team instead of the entire league’s out-of-market regional games, but the NFL is yet to get on that trend.
King ripped the streamer in his Football Morning in America column. He essentially called out YouTube TV for trying to see how much money they could squeeze out of NFL fans.
I think this explanation from YouTube about its pricing schedule was rich. YouTube VP Christian Oestlien to Daniel Kaplan of The Athletic: ”One of the things we really wanted to do is introduce a much greater level of simplicity and clarity in the pricing for users, so if you have YouTube TV, it’s an additional $249 at this point [with a presale discount], and if you don’t have YouTube TV if you’re not ready for it, you can buy [Sunday Ticket] as a standalone subscription.” Yes, of course! It would have been so complex and hard to understand to tell people they could buy their team only for $150, or whatever. Just say what you really mean: We’re testing the market to see how many people we can get an additional $200 a year from even though they’re probably only going to watch their favorite team from far away. Oestlien said YouTube is “doing research” on single-team options. If they announce a single-team option before Labor Day, I’ll give them credit. But I don’t think they’ll be doing that.
Personally, depending on the price and if Red Zone Channel was a factor, I feel like the bigger value is in having access to all games. That said, it probably wouldn’t hurt to give consumers the option. Who knows, for many people, a lower price point to watch one team may be the difference in them paying for something instead of nothing.
Who knows, maybe an option to subscribe to a single team will be in Sunday Ticket’s future. If that happens, Peter King will be a fan of that move.
