Football fans, save your pennies. YouTube has just announced the pricing of its Sunday Ticket Package. Access to the season’s games will be available for as low as $249 and up to $489.
Pricing is… confusing. Let’s quickly go over it.
YouTube TV subscribers will pay:
- Sign up today to receive the basic season-long package with out-of-market gaming games for $249
- RedZone Channel: $289 (Which is a must. RedZone is amazing.
- If you missed the presale, the basic package will be $349
- RedZone package includes $389 if you missed the presale
- For $10.99 per month, you can also get onlyRedZone via YouTube TV. You can purchase the Sports Plus addon.
Instead, subscribe to YouTube’s Primetime Channels instead.
- If you sign up during the presale, the base package will cost $349
- RedZone package available for $389 during the presale
- After the presale ends, the base package will be $449
- $489 for the complete package post-presale
YouTube TV subscriptions are clearly better, but this also means that you will need to pay the $72.99 monthly subscription fee for YouTube TV’s live TV system. It’s costly, no matter how you slice it.
It’s also very expensive. After a heated battle with Apple, YouTube is now paying $2 billion per year to get this package. YouTube is making a bold statement as it continues its quest to be a traditional entertainment company. Although some people believed that YouTube would offer an artificially low price to attract more users, it was never likely. You won’t make it very far with a $2 billion growth hack.
Although Sunday Tickets are more expensive than usual, they have always been very expensive.
It is also very similar to the price of Sunday Ticket in the past. The package was distributed last year by DirecTV at a cost of $293.94. The Max Plan, which included RedZone and a DirecTV-made Fantasy Zone channel, was $395.99. It was also estimated that DirecTV lost approximately $500 million per year on this package. DirecTV’s biggest problem was not the price. It simply couldn’t keep its streams running last year. Constant service interruptions can be a problem when you pay nearly $100 per month to watch football once a week.
This package may have multiple ways of being sliced over time. Christian Oestlien (VP of product management at YouTube) says, “We’re partnering the NFL to examine different types of packages.” “We might offer midseason or late-season — that’s just the beginning of that research.” Oestlien says that the partnership with YouTube is long-term and that what you see in Sunday Tickets this year will not be the final result.
YouTube has also developed some features specific to football. These include which allows you to view multiple games at once, tools to buy team merchandise, and YouTube-y things such as live chat and polls. Primetime Channels subscribers will see live games on their YouTube feeds. There will also be highlights and fantasy data throughout the platform. There have been very few (or none) opportunities to rethink Sunday Ticket since DirecTV aired it from 1994 to 2022. YouTube has a lot of potential.
However, the first job is to stream the game without interruptions or weirdness. Oestlien states that while it may seem simple, there is a lot to it. It took Amazon a while before it figured out its Thursday Night Football strategy. Apple’s first attempts at MLB broadcasts were a disaster, and YouTube has never done something like this before. YouTube has the potential to bring football to its platform in a way that traditional cable companies cannot. It must stream the Packers’ games flawlessly to millions of viewers far away. It’s not an easy task.
